The Magazine of the National Intelligence Community
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July/August 2014 Volume 12, Issue 5
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GEOSPATIAL INTELLIGENCE FORUM Features
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Satellites and other GEOINT assets are playing a much more active role in monitoring and managing disasters, both those caused by human conflicts and those caused by nature, and analysts predict these capabilities will grow stronger in coming years. By Henry Canaday
The unrest that swept the Middle East in the Arab Spring of 2011 not only caught the U.S. national security community by surprise, but also brought home in a dramatic way to intelligence analysts that they needed to expand their traditional sources of information by incorporating social media and other open source material into the overall intelligence picture. By Peter Buxbaum
Eyes on Disasters
Open Source Goes Multi-INT
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Standards developed within the framework of the Defense Intelligence Information Enterprise are facilitating interoperability and information sharing among key defense intelligence activities such as the Distributed Common Ground System, according to participants at a recent government/industry demonstration. By Harrison Donnelly
The experiences of more than a decade of ground operations have shaped and changed the geographic information system software used most often by the Department of Defense, as well as the ways in which military forces use GIS for intelligence and command and control. By Harrison Donnelly
After providing huge operational benefits to warfighters and transforming ISR technology in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan, unmanned aerial systems equipped for overhead imaging and other sensing are poised to bring major changes to the domestic GEOINT field. By Harrison Donnelly
Plugging Into Intel
July/August 2014 Volume 12, Issue 5
On the Ground with GIS
New Era for Aerial Sensing
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IT Initiative Seen Facing Challenges
The IC ITE, launched by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in 2011, is aimed at reducing IT spending by the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies by 25 percent, while also improving information sharing and security By Harrison Donnelly
16 Francis X. Taylor Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis DHS
“One of my top priorities as under secretary is to enhance I&A’s unique mission of linking the IC with our state and local
Departments
Industry Interview
2 Editor’s Perspective 3 Program Notes/ 4 People 14 Industry Raster 27 Resource Center
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Senior Vice President Government Relations DigitalGlobe
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EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE
Geospatial Intelligence Forum Volume 12, Issue 5 • July/August 2014
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You don’t hear the term “supply side economics” much anymore, but a new report suggests that it will be the supply—in this case of technological innovations—that will drive the defense geospatial market in the coming years. Although the withdrawal from Afghanistan and tight military budgets have been expected to hold down demand for GEOINT products and services, the new Frost & Sullivan report predicts that Department of Defense spending will increase as it moves to take advantage of systems designed to give commanders a more complete understanding Harrison Donnelly of the environment in which they are operating. Editor The report projects that DoD spending on geospatial products, services and research will reach $2.43 billion in 2018, with the largest portion of spending, some $900 million, allotted to engineering and integration initiatives. Improvements in dissemination will lead to $713 million in spending, while targeting enhancements will receive $579 million. Other priorities will be to strengthen relationships in time and space, the report indicates, as well as to develop multi-INT network-centric mission applications that integrate information arising from sensors, signal/image processors, and other sources. What really caught my eye in the report, though, was a chart of the factors driving and restraining spending between now and 2018. The biggest positive influence will be the search for multi-fused geospatial products, while improvements in light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology will really start having an impact toward the end of the decade. What’s holding things back, the report continues, is the same trouble that is bedeviling just about everyone else as well—big data and the intractable problems of processing massive flows of frequently disorganized information. By comparison, the reduced pace of overseas operations will be of declining importance as the years go by. Given all that, Senior Industry Analyst John Hernandez held out this vision for the future: “With such extensive efforts being made to introduce new technologies, it will not be long before geospatial tools become interactive to the point where they will not only offer a battlefield commander situational awareness, but also suggest possible/logical plans of action.”
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PROGRAM NOTES
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Cardillo to Head NGA Intelligence veteran Robert Cardillo has been named as the next director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The current director, Letitia A. Long, announced her decision to retire later this year after four years at the helm of the agency and more than 35 years of government service. Long took the reins at NGA in August 2010. Under her leadership, the agency has shifted from providing static products, such as maps, to providing geospatial intelligence services that enable users to access information that provides “time and place” context in a variety of formats, in real time, for users on all security domains. The agency has developed the initial launch of its “Map of the World,” which for the first time presents an integrated view of collection assets from across the intelligence community; mapping information for military operations; geospatial intelligence observations; and NGA analytic products, data and models. Cardillo currently serves as the deputy director for national intelligence for intelligence integration, and previously served as the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), deputy director for analysis at
Robert Cardillo
DIA, and director of analysis and production at NGA. He is slated to formally succeed Long in October. In his current position, Cardillo frequently delivers the morning intelligence briefing to President Obama. He is perhaps best known outside the intelligence community as a result of a White House photo showing him briefing the president with the aid of a tablet computer—thus highlighting the potential of mobile computing for intelligence, which has also been a major theme of Long’s tenure. In a 2012 Cover Story Question & Answer interview with GIF, Cardillo offered these observations on effective use of technology:
“I’d describe what we are doing today as the equivalent of paving a cow path. We’re speeding up a pre-existing process. We know how to type things on pages or put pages in a binder for an executive to read. It’s easy to put that on a tablet, and instead of turning pages, they are clicking or touching the screen. It’s not really advancing very much. I believe that we have much to learn from education, the entertainment industry and medicine about what humans can get out of an interactive digital display that we haven’t yet figured out. “As you can see from the photo, we have given a few such briefings to this president. But I would never take in a tablet to impress him with the graphics. Every time we’ve used one, there’s been a purpose, to simulate some scientific event or kinetic scenario, or to help him to think differently or challenge an assumption. We’re really at the beginning here, and I don’t think it’s something we need to figure out on our own. There are a lot of people thinking about how to make the best use of technology. We’re on the cusp of something here, and there’s more to be done in leveraging that technology,” Cardillo said.
Limits Eased on High Resolution Imagery In a move with important implications for the international remote sensing market, the Department of Commerce has cleared the way for DigitalGlobe to sell extremely high resolution imagery from its newest satellite. DigitalGlobe is now permitted to offer customers the highest resolution imagery available from its current constellation. Additionally, the updated approvals will permit DigitalGlobe to sell imagery to all of its customers at up to 0.25m panchromatic and 1.0-m multispectral ground sample distance beginning six months after the satellite, WorldView-3, is operational. WorldView-3 is scheduled to launch in August from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. Current restrictions bar sale of images with better than 0.50-m resolution. DigitalGlobe, the remaining U.S.-based satellite imagery provider, has pressed to move the limit to 0.25 m, arguing that it harms their ability to compete on the www.GIF-kmi.com
world market, where a number of international companies have been moving to offer higher resolution products. Approval of the new limit had been expected ever since key intelligence community officials announced this spring that they would no longer oppose it. With the launch of WorldView-3, company executives say, the DigitalGlobe constellation will set a new technological bar for commercial satellite imagery, offering customers the highest available resolution, revisit rate, capacity and spectral diversity. The company currently operates a fleet of five high-resolution earth imaging satellites. Two of those satellites—GeoEye-1 and WorldView-2—collect imagery sharper than 0.50 m, and all customers will have access to that imagery at the highest native resolution. WorldView-3 will provide even higher resolution at 0.31 m.
“Our customers will immediately realize the benefits of this updated regulation, as for the first time, we will be able to make our very best imagery available to the commercial market. As a result of this policy update and the forthcoming addition of WorldView-3 to our constellation, DigitalGlobe will further differentiate itself from foreign competition and expand our addressable market,” said Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey R. Tarr. Additionally, DigitalGlobe announced plans to shift the WorldView-1 satellite into a different orbit, in which it will image the Earth in the afternoon local time each day. This shift will optimize the DigitalGlobe constellation to monitor changes on the earth at various times during the day. Customers will be able to image a particular area with multiple satellites in the morning and again with WorldView-1 in the afternoon, thus providing consistent views of Earth over much of the day. GIF 12.5 | 3
PROGRAM NOTES
Compiled by KMI Media Group staff
LiDAR Powers 3-D Elevation Data In response to the growing need for high-quality 3-D representations of natural and constructed features, the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) National Geospatial Program is advancing the 3-D Elevation Program (3DEP). 3DEP uses modern technology to systematically collect high-density light detection and ranging (LiDAR) elevation data over the U.S. and interferometric synthetic aperture radar data above Alaska, where cloud cover and remote locations in many cases preclude the use of LiDAR. “Looking at LiDAR is like looking at the world through 3-D glasses,” said Kevin Gallagher,
the USGS associate director for core science systems. “Phenomena that were once obscured are suddenly fully evident in rich color and detail. As you might expect, the applications of
such new and transformational data are growing rapidly, from civil engineering, precision agriculture and flood inundation modeling, to forest management, intelligent vehicle navigation and emergency response. A national dataset of such data will drive innovation, transform government and industry, and stimulate the economy.” Elevation data are essential to a broad range of applications and support a large range of business uses, including national security, wildlife and habitat management, water resource management and geologic hazards mitigation, to name a few.
PEOPLE Navy Captain Dale E. Horan, who has been selected for the rank of rear admiral (lower half), will be assigned as deputy director for Operations, National Joint Operations Intelligence Center, Operations Team Five, J-3, Joint Staff. Navy Captain Steven L. Parode, who has been selected for the rank of rear admiral (lower half), will be assigned as director of intelligence, J-2, U.S. Strategic Command, Offutt Air Force Base, Neb. Brigadier General John T. Rauch Jr. has been assigned as director of ISR strategy, plans, doctrine and force development, Deputy Chief of Staff, ISR, Headquarters U.S. Air Force. CIA veteran Doug Wise has been appointed to succeed David Shedd as the next deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Shedd and DIA Director Lieutenant General Michael Flynn recently announced their departure from the agency later this year.
4 | GIF 12.5
Compiled by KMI Media Group staff
The National GeospatialIntelligence Agency has inducted four geospatial innovators into its Hall of Fame. They are Steven Hall, who helped lead an effort to digitize NGA’s maritime safety of navigation charts and maritime publications; Ray Helmering, Ph.D., who helped develop imagery and photographic solutions that underlie digital geospatial products and information that NGA uses today; the late Marie Tharp, who produced the first map of the ocean floor; and Steven P. Wallach, who had a long and distinguished career providing geospatial intelligence to partners in the defense and intelligence communities.
U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s Arthur C. LundahlThomas C. Finnie Lifetime Achievement Award. Lenczowski is an independent geospatial information-intelligence consultant who spent 28 years in the public sector. She retired in 2005 from the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency, where she finished her NGA career as executive director of NGA Campus West in St. Louis. She also served three years as NGA’s technical executive, and was also director of operations with the National Imagery and Mapping Agency for more than five years.
consulting firm, has appointed Gregory Reyes as its new senior director of business development, where he will be responsible for defense, intel and State Department business development and emerging market development.
Greg Johnson has joined Continental Mapping Consultants as defense and intelligence practice director, where he will be responsible for expanding global geospatial intelligence services to the defense and intelligence community, including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
Jill Pomeroy has joined Ball Aerospace as director of legislative affairs. Pomeroy previously served as legislative affairs director for DigitalGlobe. In addition, Michael O’Hara has been selected as Ball’s director of business development for space technology and services. He most recently worked as director for civil space propulsion development at Aerojet Rocketdyn.
Roberta “Bobbi” Lenczowski is the latest recipient of the
IntelliDyne, an enterprise infrastructure management IT
Intergraph Government Solutions (IGS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intergraph Corp. serving the U.S. federal market, has appointed Joseph Fehrenbach as president and chief executive officer. Prior to his promotion to this position by the IGS board of directors, Fehrenbach served as acting president and chief operating officer for IGS, where he also serves on the board of directors.
Joseph Fehrenbach
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Eyes on Disasters
Satellites stand sentinel by providing imagery to monitor the course of natural and man-made catastrophes. Satellites and other GEOINT assets are playing a much more active role in monitoring and managing disasters, both those caused by human conflicts and those caused by nature, and analysts predict these capabilities will grow stronger in coming years. The experience of Erin Gallaher, currently director of emergency investigations and response for Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), illustrates the changes that have already occurred. When Gallagher worked on war crimes at The Hague in 1995, she obtained from the U.S. government images of mass graves, burials, destroyed mosques, mass prisoners and bus movements. But it took a long while to get these pictures from defense and intelligence 6 | GIF 12.5
bureaucracies, and that was years after Balkan atrocities had been committed. In 2014, however, Gallagher’s access to imaging is much more rapid. To document attacks on hospitals in Syria, PHR went to the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS). “We wanted to know which hospitals had been bombed, so we gave them coordinates and they got images from DigitalGlobe,” Gallagher explained. AAAS marked and highlighted the still pictures, showing hospitals and nearby roads had been hit. “We’d always love more, but funding is an issue,” she said, adding that the State Department has a program to assist NGOs in this work, but PHR needed Syrian data fast,
By Henry Canaday GIF Correspondent so it went directly to AAAS and did not have to pay for Syrian images. “I can’t underscore enough how helpful these images are, especially in places like Syria where we can’t get in. I’d love more pictures and would take all that anyone can give me,” Gallagher said.
Africa Initiative Another prominent user of GEOINT for humanitarian purposes has been the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP), of which the actor George Clooney has been a very active sponsor. Also using images from DigitalGlobe, SSP tracks conflicts in the troubled central African region that comprises the nations of www.GIF-kmi.com
This map series near the northern boundary of Lake Pontchartrain, La., shows how ERDAS Imagine can analyze radar imagery of hurricane flooding. Map 1 serves as a pre-hurricane reference map; Map 2 shows the radar-sensed post-hurricane water areas (dark blue); and Map 3 clearly identifies where large amounts of standing water exist onshore (light blue). [Images courtesy of Intergraph Government Solutions]
Congo, Central African Republic, Sudan and South Sudan. “We have tight focus. All these countries and conflicts border on each other,” explained Mark Quarterman, director of research and programs for the Enough Project at the Center for American Progress, which runs the SSP. Quarterman said he has been very pleased with the images provided by DigitalGlobe. “We understand we are not their only client, but we get the coverage we need. Sometimes we tip them based on our information, and sometimes they tip us when they see something interesting.” DigitalGlobe analyzes the images and provides SSP with still pictures. “They are the experts on images. We are the experts on the conflicts. “So far, we have been able to pay for the images, and they have been very generous,” Quarterman said. More images would always help, he acknowledged, but too many daily images might overload the small SSP staff. Imagery is just one piece of the anticatastrophe effort. For example, Clooney recently announced the project will look into the funds and assets behind those guilty of human-rights abuses in the region. This new effort will rely on traditional forensic techniques rather than overhead imager. SSP started out as a project of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI). The imagery required depends on specific situations, noted Isaac Baker, imagery analysis manager at HHI. “When I first started, civilians were stuck in the middle of a war between the government of Sudan and militias aligned with the newly forming South Sudan. I had to identify military actors, ordnance, vehicles and infrastructure,” he said. www.GIF-kmi.com
Baker needed high-resolution, submeter imagery to do this with confidence, and high-resolution imagery was also useful in understanding refugee and displacedpopulation camps, for example by counting tents to determine capacity. But lower-resolution satellites like Landsat and MODIS also provide valuable data, he added. “Anything from flooding assessments to widespread fire damage due to conflicts could be analyzed with these sensors.” Those images are easily accessible at little or no cost. In addition, Baker emphasized, analysis starts with good intelligence on the ground. “You have to know, as best you can, what you are looking at. This information makes the imagery sing.” The first challenge in using imagery is cost, especially for nonprofit humanitarian organizations, he noted. These NGOs must know exactly what they want to look for and where. Another challenge, especially in local rainy seasons, is cloud cover. Analysts must stay on top of weather reports and know when clouds are due. “The skies might be working against you.” HHI encourages open communication between satellite companies and humanitarian organizations. For example, Baker is pleased that companies like Skybox are active in humanitarian work. HHI’s Signal Program is now building algorithms to assist human analysts, which will speed and improve the efficiency of interpreting images in time-sensitive situations. Baker also advocates more common standards for the analysis, annotating and release of imagery in humanitarian disasters. “This is something we’re developing as we do the work.”
Images and Interpretation Private firms are eager to help humanitarian agencies with both images and their interpretation. DigitalGlobe’s FirstLook, for example, is an online subscription service for emergency management. It provides Webbased access to images of damaged locations following natural or man-made crises. FirstLook’s vector layers show the key features in images, such as buildings, towns, cities, villages and industrial parks, that first responders are most interested in. Tomnod is DigitalGlobe’s crowd-sourcing platform that enables volunteers to use real-time satellite imagery. When a natural disaster strikes, Tomnod calls for volunteers to view images and tag signs of damaged buildings, impassable roads or features to assist in relief efforts. The insight derived from Tomnod campaigns supports first responders on the ground, humanitarian groups, mappers and academic institutions. Tomnod has already been used in the so-far unsuccessful search for Malaysia Flight MH370. DigitalGlobe’s satellite images enable analysts to compare before, during and after images of disasters. FirstLook relies on satellites and ground infrastructure to deliver imagery in as little as four hours. In many instances, like the conflict in Ukraine, satellite images are the only way to immediately understand what’s happening on the ground. More capability is on the way. DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3, a super-spectral, high-resolution satellite, is scheduled to launch in mid-August. In humanitarian crises, Airbus Defense and Space (AD&S) is usually called on for GIF 12.5 | 7
images of displaced people, especially in camps, according to Franck Ranera, manager of geointelligence for emergency services. In some cases, AD&S is asked to help evaluate camp locations for access to water and transport with high-resolution images, up to 1.5 meters, from SPOT5 and SPOT6 satellites. The company can also assist in monitoring camp capacity, conditions, density, overcrowding and need for expansion. Higher resolution is needed in these cases, so AD&S can turn to its Pleiades satellites, with 50-centimeter resolution, and now also can offer digital elevation modeling through its new WorldDEM service, improving accuracy for relief organizations. AD&S monitors the environment’s recovery and availability of natural resources after a natural disaster. Here the key requirement is frequency of refreshed images, for instance every 15 days, to assess the local environment. When Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, AD&S satellites were directed to the region. Images were available to aid organizations under the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters. With the launch of SPOT 7 soon, AD&S will enhance its capabilities. Pleiades and SPOT will be able to collect more than 20 million square kilometers of data daily, at resolutions of 0.5 to 1.5 meters, for any point on earth. The company can analyze as well as provide images. The biggest challenge generally occurs during the initial emergency phase of a disaster, when very fast reactions are required, Ranera said. “Change detection data needs to be relayed within 24 to 48 hours.” AD&S can help meet this challenge. “Few companies can guarantee a combination of daily satellite revisits and changedetection information,” he observed. Next year, AD&S will add Hisdesat’s Paz satellite with a second radar component. Ranera said he believes WorldDEM will be an enduring resource, providing much more precise mapping support.
Change Detection Intergraph is the visualization and analysis part of Hexagon AB, explained Rob Mott, vice president of geospatial solutions, Intergraph Government Solutions. Sister companies make optical, LiDAR and other sensors, and Intergraph helps customers 8 | GIF 12.5
use, manage and make decisions with the resulting images. For example, the company offers COTS applications for desktop or mobile devices that map streets, coasts and boundaries and combine data from assorted equipment over time to illuminate trends and detect differences. The tool has been used in response to disasters such as the hurricane in Haiti. The Intergraph application also can exploit radar, for example from the European Space Agency’s new Sentinel satellites, integrating it with LIDAR and other overhead images. “We excel in working with a wide variety of file formats,” Mott said. Human-caused and natural disasters have several common features, including the need for wide coverage, rapid changes on the ground, heavy destruction, and a high degree of unpredictability. But there are significant differences as well; natural disasters tend to cross political boundaries, so files have to be shared among many countries. Easy file sharing requires open standards, which Intergraph uses. Communications may be destroyed in any disaster, so it is useful to have pre-distributed data on infrastructure such as local hospitals beforehand. First responders have GPS on personal devices and can find locations without communication networks. Even when communication is restored, it may have limited bandwidth. Responders need applications that work under these limits, which Intergraph provides. During and after a disaster, analysts usually want every kind of image they can get their hands on, noted Lee Bader, business development director for Leidos. Electrooptical, hyperspectral, full-motion video, radar and LiDAR are especially valuable. Leidos helps collect, process, exploit and disseminate these data for humanitarian purposes. For example, in the 2010 Haitian earthquake, the company immediately updated map data over Haiti using commercial images and created atlases within 48 hours, a task that normally takes several weeks. Leidos now offers collection of nontraditional data from social and other media to identify issues and provide forecasts for disaster management. The biggest humanitarian challenge is not gathering intelligence, but discovering and accessing it, Bader said. Handling all the information gathered can also be tough. In response, Leidos has developed a geospatial content management solution,
which is a COTS tool for archiving, discovering, retrieving and disseminating intelligence and images. The Leidos technology has a browser-based search interface, is flexible and scalable, and can evolve with analyst needs.
Tremor Tracking The Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) project uses land-based GPS, satellite-based radar or optical images based on geodetic measurements of the earth to predict or deal with natural disasters. GPS instruments can be permanently installed and monitor earth movements like seismometers, only better. Thousands of GPS devices have been installed in the western U.S. and Japan, with hundreds in Taiwan and New Zealand. GPS-registered earth movements indicate underground movements in magma and thus help predict volcanoes. Geodesy cannot predict earthquakes, but can gauge effects. “It might also give you 10 to 15 seconds warning of an earthquake several hundred miles away that has not gotten to you yet,” observed Mark Simons, a professor of geophysics at California Institute of Technology’s Seismological Laboratory, which is collaborating with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on the project. Such brief warnings could be automated, for example to move elevators to a floor, open firehouse doors or shut gas lines off before the quake hits. Short warnings might also be provided for tsunamis as GPS registers coastal movement toward the sea. What ground GPS does in limited areas could be done much more widely by interferometric SAR (InSAR) on satellites, which can see at night and through clouds over the globe. Use of InSAR is expected to increase dramatically as a result of the new European Sentinel satellites. “Images can be 100 to 300 kilometers across and arbitrarily long,” Simons said. Once the second Sentinel is up in 2015, it will provide coverage of any point on Earth on an average of once every 36 hours. Japan will launch InSAR satellites, and the U.S. is working with India on another launch, so in about five years InSAR images should be available in less than a day, Simons predicted. That means major benefits. “We can see the refill of aquifers, the effects of aquifers www.GIF-kmi.com
not have seismic instruments installed on them now. “If we can spot movement, we can put instruments on them ahead of time,” said Webb. The ARIA team honed its skills in the 2012 Hurricane Sandy and other disasters. It can now generate reports a few hours after receiving data, and InSAR data will soon come rapidly. Webb said a primary goal is to get Sentinel images out fast to users. ARIA can fuse all the data, from traditional seismometers, GPS installations and InSAR images into unified pictures. If adequately funded at a few millions of dollars annually, ARIA could offer the world economies of scale in helping with disasters, said Webb, adding that competition from similar efforts might be helpful as well. “We might get better products and some redundancy.” There is a business case for disaster imaging as well. For 12 months, PERILS, a European insurance industry initiative aimed at improving the availability of catastrophe insurance market
data, tested an offer to the insurance industry of satellite-based footprints of major floods. The focus was insured loss potential rather than humanitarian consequences, explained PERILS executive Eduard Held. The company is now deciding whether and how to offer this service, Satellite Flood Footprints (SSF), in the future. Insurers need high-quality pictures of the entire flooded area in less than two to three days of flood peak in a ready-touse format such as GeoTIFF or shape files, noted Held. Images may be low resolution but must be affordable. The trial of SSF used radar images from RADARSAT-1/2, TerraSAR-X ScanSAR/ StripMap from AD&S and optical images from SPOT4 and SPOT5. O
For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup. com or search our online archives for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.
Image Courtesy of f the DoD.
and fracking, what happens during and after an eruption, and where you should send aid,” Simons explained. To be useful for disasters, satellite data must be rapidly converted into information available and useful to first responders. That is the goal of ARIA, which has built a prototype system for converting all the data into easy-to-understand visuals on responders’ mobile devices. Making this same system operational would require only a few million dollars a year, Simons estimated. “We had handcrafted products for responders,” explained Frank Webb, manager of earth science research formulation at JPL. “We want to make it automatic, fast and uniform. By doing upfront planning, we can respond quickly.” ARIA is a data-analysis system with the pipes and plumbing to offer emergency products fast. To be sure, it can’t predict earthquakes, because the physics of those subterranean catastrophes are not yet well understood. But volcanic eruptions are predictable, and most of the earth’s volcanoes do
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GIF 12.5 | 9
Standards developed within the framework of the Defense Intelligence Information Enterprise (DI2E) are facilitating interoperability and information sharing among key defense intelligence activities such as the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS), according to participants at a recent government/industry demonstration. The second annual DI2E Plugfest and Mashup Challenge, organized by the Association for Enterprise Information and hosted by the C4I Center at George Mason University (GMU), brought together some 30 vendor companies and hundreds of attendees to explore the role of standards and specifications in improving capabilities that turn collected data into intelligence information. The centerpiece of the event was a competition in which three teams showed their expertise in connecting and integrating sensor feeds and industry-provided software capabilities to present a complete intelligence picture. The competitors were a team of GMU students, a group representing the DCGSSpecial Operations Forces, and the winner, the Counter-Narcotics Information Sharing Team. DI2E, a framework for interoperability and governance that unites Department of Defense intelligence programs, has received increasing attention of late as the bridge between two major
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IT restructuring efforts: DoD’s Joint Information Environment and the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise, which is being overseen by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As David L. De Vries, DoD acting principal deputy chief information officer, observed, the goal is to help answer the fundamental questions facing all intelligence information: “How do I know about the data, how do I share it, and how do I combine things to produce a different picture? And how can I uniquely display it, hopefully on a portable device?” De Vries added that the department should do more mashups and plugfests, taking advantage of a popular IT event format that brings together developers to test the interoperability of their products.
Importance of Standards During the event, a panel of intelligence managers offered insights into the needs of DI2E program users, especially the various DCGS components, and how industry can respond effectively. George “Dan” Doney, chief innovation officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), emphasized the importance of paying
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Defense Intelligence Information Enterprise standards seen as facilitating interoperability and information sharing. attention to standards. “If folks don’t develop to standards, and industry does not use them in things they provide to the government, and the government does not respect and buy standards based capabilities, there is no point to a standard. What we have now is a very non-standardized, fragmented environment. The reason why we haven’t seen the emergence of true universal standards across government is because they are so obscure at this point,” he said. In conjunction with DI2E, Doney noted, DIA is pursuing a nontraditional way of operating focused on closing the information gap between intelligence community customers and companies that would like to do business with them. The agency is launching outreach efforts to that end, including setting up a new Open Innovation Gateway designed to give innovators the opportunity to showcase capabilities in a realistic emulation of the operational environment. For Colonel Charles Wells, project manager for the Army’s version of DCGS, the top priority is to make the system easier to use. “We’ve got powerful capabilities, but they have a learning curve and take time to learn and use,” he said. “You didn’t have to go to a training class to learn to use your smartphone or tablet. Our intel systems should be the same way. These systems should be intuitive. Our analysts should be able to train as they go, and
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By Harrison Donnelly GIF Editor
do powerful analysis in a short period of time. What I want to do is get more ease of use into the program. We’ve done that in the latest release of DCGS-Army, but I want to keep doing that and getting more ease of use.” Charles J. Gassert Jr., assistant program manager for DCGSNavy, urged his service to take a more proactive approach to generating intelligence. “In the Navy, we have to make a big adjustment of our mindset, Gassert said. “Historically, we have always been consumers, but sooner or later the data just falls on the ground. We have to rectify that, and also teach the Navy to become producers. We have to transition from being just consumers of data to both producers and consumers. That’s going to be our next problem.” The Marine Corps, meanwhile, is about to field its DCGS component, with initial capability expected within a few months and full operation planned for early 2015, according to Daniel M. Fitzgerald, DCGS product manager for Marine Corps Systems Command. O
For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup.com or search our online archives for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.
GIF 12.5 | 11
On the Ground with GIS
Experiences of a decade of war shape both software for land operations and the ways the military uses it. By Harrison Donnelly GIF Editor
The experiences of more than a decade of ground operations have shaped and changed the geographic information system software used most often by the Department of Defense, as well as the ways in which military forces use GIS for intelligence and command and control. Esri, developer of the industry-leading ArcGIS solution, offers ArcGIS for the Military—Land Operations, which is optimized to provide an interoperable platform to manage, visualize, analyze and share geospatial information for land-based missions. It is one of a series of packages of templates and standardized workflows, offered without charge to ArcGIS customers, that are designed to meet the unique needs of each industry.
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with ease of use of the tools. We didn’t have The Land Operations module has been a enough of that in the early years. key tool in the hands of military intelligence “With the military, we do get feedback, analysts in Southwest Asia, and has been but the hardest part is to make the change useful for fostering information sharing and then get it out to the people who needed into command and control systems, accordit. The most important part was not only ing to Ben Conklin, Esri lead for defense getting the feedback, but also being able to solutions. rapidly deploy the template The modules are revised to users. That’s where we and updated on an ongoing really have a great relationbasis to reflect changes in ship with the Army, which military doctrine and to capnot only helped us get the ture the best practices and requirements for what was current techniques that were needed, but also helped us being used in Afghanistan share the work when it was and Iraq and turn them into done on the networks and useful templates that meet the systems they had access the needs of warfighters on to,” he added. the ground. Ben Conklin ArcGIS for the Military— Land Operations evolved out of Esri’s Common Ground long relationship with the Army, Conklin explained. Such changes are evident in the revised “As we worked with those programs, we set of customized templates recently prorealized we needed to do a lot more to help vided by Esri for the Distributed Common users apply this generic toolset to the speGround System-Army (DCGS-A), that sercific missions of the military. There are a lot vice’s linchpin system for managing ISR of specific requirements they have, such as data. With easy-to-use templates compristhe military symbologies. They need to use ing maps, analytic capabilities and other military standard symbology to make prodvisualization tools, as well as a simple ucts, and we wanted to make that easy to do information model for creating geospatial inside a GIS system,” he said. products, the templates help users rapidly “It’s very complex, but it’s something make products to support requests from they need to do within a GIS to use it effeccommanders. tively,” Conklin continued. “It’s more than The templates were customized to supporting the standard, but also makmatch the DCGS-A workflows. Esri staff ing sure that it is easy to use and flexible. worked with analysts and specialists at the That was one area we worked on over the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence at years, but we realized that we needed to get Fort Huachuca, Ariz., to refine the temmore tools and workflows to help the miliplate requirements. The revised templates tary build their standard mapping products. include incident analysis capabilities for That’s what drove us to do this.” mapping IED and other events; cross-counOriginally called ArcGIS for the try mobility analysis to identify key terrain Warfighter, the product was subsequently and sketch approach routes; and intervisifocused on land operations, specifically on bility analysis to identify areas of cover and the different needs of the military intelliconcealment. gence and C2 communities. “We had some success in getting a com“When we sat down with the Army, what munity of DCGS-A users to give us direct they envisioned was bringing those cominput into the kind of things they would like munities together and making it possible to see in terms of templates and workflows,” to share information between intelligence Conklin explained. “We worked closely with and C2. So we decided to approach this as them to get exactly what they needed and one big solution,” Conklin said. “On the get some direct feedback from key peointel side, a lot of analysts use our ArcGIS ple, and then get it released out to the field software out of the box as part of systems and put into use quickly. That was unusual, like the DCGS-A. On the C2 side, they are because most of the work we have done is primarily building embedded solutions, as on long cycles, with not that much interacdevelopers put our software into specialized tion and feedback from users. The project systems. That’s what makes the communilast year was all about working with peoties so different—on the intelligence side, ple to get what they needed and help them www.GIF-kmi.com
we are dealing with direct end-users. But on the C2 side, we are dealing with system integrators and developers. Still, they do have many of the same needs in terms of mapping and analytic capability.”
Doctrinal Changes Another challenge arose from changes in military doctrine as it has evolved away from conventional operations. “We started doing this project trying to use established doctrine as much as possible in the definition of templates. That was challenging for some things in a stability operations context, where you don’t create as many standard planning products as you might in other types of conflicts. So we found ourselves needing to make a lot more nonstandard products about things that we weren’t able to find in field manuals and didn’t have as much defined doctrine,” Conklin said. “There wasn’t a lot of established doctrine for some types of products, such as analyzing IED data to determine patterns and identify threats,” he added. “That was an emerging area where people needed GIS, but didn’t have established practices that we could pick up. That changed a lot. In the beginning, we focused on conventional stuff from manuals and doctrine. But over the course of our development, we did a lot more to directly support the operations that people were conducting. “What they’re doing is taking the lessons learned from these conflicts and incorporating them into traditional doctrine. We’ve learned from experience and put in some new tools that we can put into the new doctrinal workflows,” he noted. The efforts are bearing fruit, Conklin reported. “I see more cases where information is being shared, and systems are more able to talk to each other than in the past. In the past, we would suggest examples to people, and they would comment that that was just not possible, since they couldn’t get access to the data. But some of those barriers are being broken down. Now when I show examples of integrating intelligence and operational data, there is a lot less resistance. There is still some way to go, but it’s becoming more common.” O
For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup. com or search our online archives for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.
GIF 12.5 | 13
INDUSTRY RASTER Alliance to Develop New Synthetic Aperture Radar Products BAE Systems and Airbus Defense and Space have announced a strategic alliance to produce, market and sell innovative GEOINT products and solutions using state-of-the-art satellite data collected exclusively by Airbus Defense and Space’s TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X radar satellites. Under the terms of the partnership, BAE Systems and Airbus Defense and Space will jointly develop a new line of global synthetic aperture
radar products that are unrivalled in terms of accuracy, resolution and quality. The two companies will exclusively market these jointly developed products to U.S. government, commercial and select international customers. The precision and richness of Airbus’s radar data products, combined with the rigor of BAE Systems’ GEOINT exploitation and analysis expertise, will drive the development of advanced geospatial products that
Airborne Surveillance System Captures Color Video
Exelis has introduced a wide area airborne surveillance system, the CorvusEye 1500, that can capture color video from multiple views over a large area. The persistent surveillance system was developed primarily to support the needs of law enforcement, border patrol, first responders and military, but could also be used in other areas. The CorvusEye system can track movement that may be connected to potentially hazardous or illicit activity, as well as other trends like
migratory or invasive wildlife behavior. The CorvusEye system includes a color electro-optical sensor that can monitor day or night over 3 kilometers in circumference. It also enables rapid decisionmaking using an embedded analytical framework developed by Exelis called CogniSense, which processes data from multiple sensors and provides information to users in real time. Kristin Jones; kristin.jones@exelisinc.com
will benefit both the public and private sectors. The resulting GEOINT products will enhance mission planning for defense customers, support flight systems, improve emergency response and help the world’s energy sector strategically plan new power grids, plot pipelines and manage resources. Charles Ratzer; charles.ratzer@baesystems.com
Space Fence to Track Objects in Earth Orbit The Air Force has awarded Lockheed Martin a $914.7 million contract to develop a system that will track objects in Earth’s orbit with far greater confidence and fidelity. The contract brings the program to final system development with the delivery of Space Fence Increment 1, or site 1, radar and a Space Fence operations center. According to program officials, it will improve space situational awareness by detecting and tracking objects such as commercial and military satellites and debris from break-up events. Coverage will extend down to just above the horizon to handle low-inclination orbits. Space Fence will provide the capability for dedicated uncued surveillance of small objects in low-earth orbit with useful capability in the higher orbit regimes. Uncued detection provides a continuous “curtain” of radar pulses forming a “fence” that enables detection, tracking and determination of objects’ orbits without prior knowledge of their existence or location. Rashi Ratan; rashi.ratan@lmco.com
New Relationship Enables Suite of Multi-Source Products
AllSource Analysis (ASA) has announced a new, global relationship with DigitalGlobe that will enable a suite of commercial, multi-source information and analytic products and services. Under the new agreement, ASA will license access to the world’s largest commercial satellite imagery archive, and ASA’s imagery and geospatial analysts will be able to leverage DigitalGlobe’s products and services to provide customers with accurate, rapid and actionable intelligence to make critical decisions in the areas of security, competitive intelligence, capacity and supply chain analytics. As a 14 | GIF 12.5
new company in the burgeoning market for imagery products and services, ASA leverages an in-house and growing network of federated analysts to deliver affordable, easy-to-use business intelligence products. ASA integrates complex imaging, geospatial and open source technologies to provide commercial and government markets with solutions to important business and security problems. Charles P. Herring; cherring@allsourceanalysis.com www.GIF-kmi.com
Compiled by KMI Media Group staff
Marketplace to Provide Unique Portal for Geospatial Data
EO/IR Surveillance and Targeting Products Enhanced
Hexagon Geospatial and CloudEO, a provider of cloudbased geo-collaboration platforms, have announced a partnership through which CloudEO will launch a commercial marketplace for geo-data and applications. CloudEO is leveraging key technologies from the Geospatial 2014 portfolio, including ERDAS Imagine and ERDAS Apollo. CloudEO is developing a new marketplace that will provide a unique portal for the creation and interpretation of geospatial data. The pilot program aims to dramatically lower the cost of creating new geospatial services by making data widely available through a cloud-based system. In addition to offering a marketplace for buying and selling geo-data and applications, the pilot will offer a scalable geo-processing platform for developing and distributing geospatial data and services from Hexagon Geospatial, based on a pay-per-use model. Jason Sims; jason.sims@hexagongeospatial.com
Planning Software Supports High-Resolution Satellite Images Orbit Logic has received a contract award from MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) to add DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3 super-spectral, high-resolution imaging satellite into its Direct Access Facility Collection Planning System (DAF CPS) software. The updated planning software will allow DigitalGlobe’s international Direct Access Program partners to task and receive imagery from WorldView-3, planned for launch in mid-August, in addition to the GeoEye-1, WorldView-1 and WorldView-2 satellites that are in service today. Orbit Logic has supplied the collection planning software component for MDA’s Direct Access Facility since the inception of the program in 2006. Orbit Logic’s collection planning software performs highfidelity satellite modeling and imagery collection planning, as well as contact scheduling, order tracking, recorder management and downlink planning. Orbit Logic’s planning software solution for DAF CPS provides advanced planning algorithms, user-friendly GUIs, and detailed 2-D and 3-D maps to support the planning process and enhance operator situational awareness. Ella Herz; ella.herz@orbitlogic.com
L-3 Wescam has released significant feature enhancements to the electro-optical and infrared (EO/IR) surveillance and targeting products within its MX-Series portfolio. For the MX-15 Surveillance System, for example, feature enhancements include color low-light, wide-angle zoom EO imager; zoom spotter; and shortwave IR imager. To improve mission capability and promote operational ease-of-use, all turrets within the MX-Series can also be equipped with L-3 Wescam’s newly launched Kinetic technologies, such as Kinetic Speed, which enables operators to gain an accurate indication of the speed at which ground vehicles are travelling.
Direct Receiving Station Offers Quick Image Access Airbus Defense and Space and its client GeoNorth have inaugurated the first commercially available multi-satellite direct receiving station (DRS) in the world, set to give a host of new markets quick access to both high-resolution and very high-resolution optical and radar satellite imagery. The DRS in Fairbanks, Alaska, will give GeoNorth the capability of priority tasking the Airbus Defense and Space satellite constellations to capture imagery anywhere on the globe and downlink data to
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its processing terminal. It draws on SPOT (5 and 6, and soon 7), Pléiades (1A and 1B), TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X satellites, which have resolutions across optical and radar products ranging from 0.25 m to 40 m. New customers, including small-scale customers who previously did not have such rapid access to such information, will be able to collect and downlink data in an instant. This new DRS brings the number of stations in the Airbus Defense and Space DRS network, the largest worldwide, to nearly 40.
GIF 12.5 | 15
Security Analyst
Q& A
Intelligence Support for All Homeland Security Missions
Francis X. Taylor Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis DHS Francis X. Taylor became the under secretary for intelligence and analysis (I&A), Department of Homeland Security, on April 14, 2014. He is charged with providing the secretary, DHS senior leadership, the DHS components, and state, local, tribal and private sector partners with the homeland security intelligence and information they need to keep the country safe, secure and resilient. I&A is a member of, and the department’s liaison to, the national intelligence community. Immediately prior to this assignment, Taylor was vice president and chief security officer for the General Electric Co. in Fairfield, Conn. At GE, he was responsible for managing the security operations and crisis management processes designed to ensure the security of GE employees and operations globally. Before GE, Taylor had a 35-year career in government service, where he held several senior positions managing investigations, security and counterterrorism issues. Most recently, he served as the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security and director of the Office of Foreign Missions, with the rank of ambassador. He was responsible for the global security of all U.S. diplomatic personnel and facilities. Taylor also served as the U.S. ambassador at large and coordinator for counterterrorism for the Department of State from July 2001 to November 2002. In this role, he was responsible for implementing U.S. counterterrorism policy overseas and coordinating the U.S. government response to international terrorist activities. During his 31 years of military service, Taylor served with distinction in numerous command and staff positions, rising to the rank of brigadier general in 1996. In his final active duty assignment, Taylor was the commander, Air Force Office of Special Investigations, and was responsible for providing Air Force leaders with comprehensive criminal, fraud, counterintelligence and security investigation and operations to protect global Air Force operations. Taylor holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in government and international studies from the University of Notre Dame, where he was named a distinguished graduate of the Air Force ROTC program. Q: How do you view your mission as under secretary for intelligence and analysis? A: Since my confirmation as under secretary for intelligence and analysis in April, I have done an in-depth review of I&A’s authorities 16 | GIF 12.5
and responsibilities, as well as assessed the value we provide to our broad customer set. I&A’s role is to enable effective information sharing among the federal government and its state, local, tribal and private sector partners, ensuring all involved have a clearer understanding of the nature of the threats that we face collectively. I&A is uniquely positioned within the department and the intelligence community to use DHS data, information from state and local law enforcement, and intelligence from the IC in a way no other agency can. One of my priorities as under secretary is to work to strengthen and improve the processes and partnerships necessary to identify and mitigate potential threats to our country and our citizens. We will do this by further strengthening DHS’s bond with the National Network of Fusion Centers to improve the two-way flow of communications and enhance I&A’s analytic contribution to the IC of information derived from departmental, state and local sources, as well as work to eliminate duplicative efforts among I&A, other DHS components and our IC partners. Q: To help provide some background on your efforts, can you give readers an overview of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, and its mission, organization and resources? A: DHS I&A serves to equip the Homeland Security Enterprise with the intelligence and information it needs to keep the homeland safe, secure and resilient. We provide intelligence support across the www.GIF-kmi.com
full range of homeland security missions and ensure that information related to homeland security threats is collected, analyzed and disseminated to all relevant customers. Our collection is guided by the Homeland Security Intelligence Priorities Framework, a unified set of homeland security information priorities within the IC linked to the National Intelligence Priority Framework. Our analysis is guided by our program of analysis, an assessment of key analytic issues, framed as key intelligence questions (KIQ). These KIQs are shaped by customer needs, administration and departmental leadership priorities, and resources. As under secretary for intelligence and analysis, I lead I&A and its four offices led by deputy under secretaries: the State and Local Program Office; Plans, Policy and Performance Management Office; Analysis Office; and Enterprise and Mission Support Office. I also serve as the chief intelligence officer (CINT) for the DHS Intelligence Enterprise. I&A works with, oversees and advocates for the component intelligence elements of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Transportation Security Administration (TSA), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Coast Guard, and U.S. Secret Service (USSS). I&A is also a member of the IC and as such, I am responsible to both the secretary of homeland security and the director of national intelligence. Our budget is primarily funded in the National Intelligence Program. Q: In your Senate confirmation testimony, you mentioned a number of goals, including strengthening of DHS’s bond with the National Network of Fusion Centers. What are you doing to bring that about? A: One of my top priorities as under secretary is to enhance I&A’s unique mission of linking the IC with our state and local partners across our country and to bring to the forefront the value and necessity of state and local information sharing and analysis. I seek to do this by strengthening DHS’s bond with the state and locally owned and operated fusion centers across the country to improve processes and partnerships necessary to identify and mitigate potential threats to our country and our citizens. I have begun to visit fusion centers across the country to learn firsthand their needs and processes and foster personal relationships with these important state and local partners. I have also reached out to the National Fusion Center Association to discuss how I&A can better align our support to National Network interests. Already, to better position DHS and fusion centers for improved operationally driven analysis, I increased the deployment of intelligence analysts to fusion centers, which will enhance information sharing from state and locals to the IC, through DHS, and vice versa. Additionally, as a means of tracking fusion center performance, I&A creates annual reports of the data captured through the annual National Network of Fusion Centers Assessment, which tracks the maturity of our nation’s fusion centers. The act of creating the report is typically a year-long process; I am working to condense this review timeline, enabling more rapid action against the identified areas for improvement. Q: How can I&A’s analytic contribution to the IC of information derived from departmental, state and local sources be enhanced, and what challenges do you face in doing so? www.GIF-kmi.com
A: What makes I&A unique in the IC is its mission to link the IC with first responders across our country. Fusion centers provide I&A with a critical beachhead from which to deliver information and analytic resources to our nation’s 18,000 police entities. In turn, I&A supports the dissemination and analysis of information derived from departmental and state and local sources, to include law enforcement information and suspicious activity reporting, to the IC to enable timely, informed action to prevent, protect against and effectively respond to threats to the homeland. In meeting this goal, I&A must balance the need to protect information to avoid compromising investigations, sources and methods, and the privacy, civil rights and civil liberties of U.S. persons. Q: What is your role as DHS chief intelligence officer, and what is your strategy for supporting the DHS Homeland Security Intelligence Enterprise? A: To better serve the department and the IC, I serve in the role of CINT, and work with DHS components to synergize intelligence activities and resolve unnecessary duplication across the department. My role as CINT is to integrate and align the efforts of the component intelligence programs to maximize the effectiveness of DHS intelligence in support of the Homeland Security Enterprise. To achieve this, I will continue to leverage the Homeland Security Intelligence Council (HSIC) as a body through which all of DHS’s intelligence elements can discuss and share their priorities and objectives, as well as de-conflict any overlapping efforts to meet the department’s mission of protecting the homeland. As CINT, I use the HSIC as a forum to set common DHS standards and oversee the execution of departmental policy and common services. This includes developing and communicating consistent enterprise priorities, and identifying and leading collaboration to address gaps in intelligence support to operations and gaps in intelligence capabilities. As CINT, to integrate intelligence efforts between I&A and all the DHS components, I ensure appropriate access to IC information to enable DHS component missions and operations. For example, I&A provides SCI network access to the components to enable direct access to IC holdings. Additionally, I&A produces tailored allsource analytic products, fusing IC, DHS component, and state and local information, specifically for the operations of the Homeland Security Enterprise. I&A also provides a centralized collection requirements management process and a centralized intelligence request for information process for the Intelligence Enterprise, including intelligence support units. I&A facilitates the synchronization of analysis and collection activities across all of the components to enable all portions of the enterprise. Q: What role do you see for geospatial technology in homeland security intelligence? A: The first thing I want to ensure your readers understand is that DHS takes its role in protecting the civil rights and civil liberties of our nation’s citizens very seriously. We are in constant discussions with the DHS Office of the General Counsel, the department’s components, such as ICE, CBP, TSA, USSS and National Protection and Programs Directorate, and the primary service provider, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, whenever we determine that geospatial technologies and the products GIF 12.5 | 17
they provide are required in support of our all-threats, all-hazards homeland security mission. This allows me to ensure the citizens of this nation are fully protected from undue or unwarranted intrusions, while accomplishing my primary mission of keeping them safe. The use of geospatial technologies in support of homeland security intelligence is not new, and we are constantly finding additional ways of taking advantage of our nation’s technical capabilities. We have been using imagery and imagery-derived products since before the establishment of the department—one such example includes supporting FEMA in its disaster preparedness and recovery missions—and the department will only grow in its dependency on these types of products and services in the foreseeable future. Specific roles for geospatial technologies to assist the department include support to infrastructure analysis, damage assessments from natural and man-made disasters, detection of illegal border crossings in remote areas, environmental assessments and studies, and geodesy and mapping requirements. Q: How is full motion video (FMV) being used in domestic intelligence, and what challenges and opportunities do you see for that technology in the future? A: I’d like to get away from using the term “domestic” intelligence and use the term you used earlier, homeland security intelligence. The CBP Office of Air and Marine (OAM) currently uses organic FMV capabilities on-board Predator unmanned aerial systems (UASs) along the nation’s southern borders and the littorals. When Predators are up and flying in support of CBP Office of Border Protection officers and their operations, the FMV capability on-board provides those officers a level of “protective over-watch” as they are conducting law enforcement operations that they might not normally have. One of the challenges CBP OAM faces, just like our IC colleagues, is one of “data overload.” The amount of raw information that gets collected needs to be analyzed for homeland security intelligence value, and we are working to ensure that the communications and storage architecture is in place for that raw data to be tagged, stored and available for retrieval at some point in the future. We are working very hard to ensure that this very valuable raw information is available to the law enforcement/homeland security community to support future operations or in preparation for disaster mitigation and recovery activities. The opportunities for the use of this technology are boundless. I mentioned earlier that the protection of the nation’s critical infrastructure is an area of potential growth for I&A and the department. It is these very technologies that will provide the foundational baseline data required to do the vulnerability analysis necessary that will ultimately provide for the protection of these critical national assets. Q: As the Federal Aviation Administration works to prepare for the use of UASs in domestic airspace, how do you see the role of airborne intelligence in homeland security changing? A: Airborne intelligence collection systems are just one of many capabilities the department will call upon in the homeland security context, but a very vital capability. Their use will have to be very carefully coordinated in areas of high-density airborne traffic 18 | GIF 12.5
to ensure the surrounding airspace is safe for all types of civilian, commercial and military aircraft. The use of UASs for homeland security purposes will change as the threats facing the homeland change, and we need to be thinking now about those threats and potential mitigation strategies. Airborne-centric intelligence capabilities will provide DHS and its components a real-time ability to influence on-going, on-the-ground law enforcement/homeland security operations. Another capability that has great promise for homeland security intelligence operations is aerostats, which have the ability to potentially provide persistent surveillance across the entire spectrum of homeland security missions. DHS Science and Technology currently has a program to improve the use of aerostats by both CBP and the first responder community, focused on improving detection, identification and classification of illicit activity and improving situational awareness during emergency events such as floods or forest fires. All of these activities will translate into better homeland security intelligence for the protection of the nation and its citizens. Q: Is your office participating in development of the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (IC ITE), and what impact do you see from it on the homeland security intelligence? A: Yes, DHS I&A is participating in the development of IC ITE. The impact of IC ITE on homeland security intelligence will be similar to that of other agencies within the IC—increased intelligence integration, increased data security, greater sharing of technology and cost avoidance through economies of scale. We are actively planning to leverage IC ITE services, which will enable us to focus our resources on I&A’s unique contribution to the IC. We are, however, cognizant that DHS primarily collects information that can only be used for authorized purposes and in ways that protect the privacy and civil liberties afforded to U.S. citizens and foreign nationals who enter or reside in the United States. We look forward to taking advantage of the IC ITE service offerings and doing our part to allow the IC to operate as one enterprise. Q: How has your extensive experience, including with the military, government and industry, shaped your approach to your current position? A: My 43 years of law enforcement, security, intelligence and crisis management experience have prepared me well to further refine and advance the efforts of my talented and dedicated predecessors in leading the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. I have had the distinct honor to serve our country as a U.S. ambassador, leading and directing diplomatic counterterrorism and diplomatic security operations. I also had the privilege to work as the chief security officer for the General Electric Co., a Fortune 10 global U.S. conglomerate. In each of these challenging but distinctly different roles, I assumed responsibility for mission execution and success. I have also had experience working both line and staff roles, developing and implementing policy, creating and managing budgets at every level, and leading operational activity to mitigate risks to our country, as well as to an American economic giant, and I understand the interdependency of the two. O www.GIF-kmi.com
As social media grows in importance, analysts need to make sure it is integrated into the overall intelligence picture.
By Peter Buxbaum GIF Correspondent
The unrest that swept the Middle East in the Arab Spring of 2011 not only caught the U.S. national security community by surprise, but also brought home in a dramatic way to intelligence analysts that they needed to expand their traditional sources of information by incorporating social Gary Raven media and other open source material into the overall intelligence picture. Decision makers would have been better informed had intelligence analysts paid attention to what was happening on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, while relying less on traditional human, signal, imagery and video intelligence feeds, critics suggested. Since that time, however, the intelligence community and industry have been
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making strides in incorporating data from social media and other open source platforms into the broader multiINT picture. Social media information and open source intelligence (OSint)—or “data in the wild,” as some call them—can be thought of as an additional set of sensors Rob Smith on the ground that complement traditional intelligence sources. Intelligence analysts can take advantage of the comments and images posted by thousands of individuals to learn of the occurrence and understand the significance of events on the ground, as well as the sentiments of strategically located populations that likely would not be picked up by traditional intelligence means.
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The theory behind fusing and correlating data from multiple sources is that richer and more diverse data sets improve the analytic possibilities. The same goes for non-traditional intelligence streams such as open source. This becomes all the more important in an era in which U.S. adversaries are as likely to include non-state actors as other nation-states. In a national security environment that includes concerns over terrorism, piracy, human trafficking and money laundering, many of the most important data feeds that contribute to analysis and targeting are not under the control of governments. From a multi-INT perspective, social and other open source data represent one more source that can be used to complete an intelligence picture. They can be used to cue other traditional intelligence assets to focus on phenomena revealed by the analysis of social data. In some cases, such as analyzing where the focus of humanitarian assistance needs to go, social media data could very well provide the primary source of relevant information. Beginning with operations in Southwest Asia, the U.S. military set up human terrain teams to add color to other intelligence reports. These analysts used material from social media sites, blogs and websites to supplement data from traditional intelligence sources.
Mark Bowersox
Peder Jungck
Predictive Model The ultimate value of OSint may be in contributing to a predictive model of intelligence. If analysts can anticipate the actions of potential adversaries on the ground, decision making can become that much more effective and efficient. “In the last 15 years we have moved from a Cold War intelligence perspective, when the focus was on orders of battle, to one focused on asymmetric threats and non-conventional actors,” said Gary Raven, director of research and engineering for Textron Systems. “In such an environment, social and cultural factors need to be included in any operational picture.” “The data generated in open sources, all of the pictures and comments that get posted, can be thought of as sensors and can act as significant force multipliers,” said Rob Smith, vice president for C4ISR at Lockheed Martin. “The world is constantly changing with new threats and risks coming about. “Having a human sensor that you don’t have to pay is becoming more and more important. People’s habits are also changing. The first thing they do is grab their smartphones to take a picture or post a comment. There is a growing opportunity to leverage that information for the sake of making better decisions,” Smith added. 20 | GIF 12.5
Mike Manzo
Frank Purdy
To be sure, adding vast new volumes of data to an already crowded intelligence field only exacerbates the perennial big data problems with which intelligence systems and analysts already have to deal. “You are trying to find the one or two posts or Tweets that are important to your mission,” said Mark Bowersox, strategic product manager at Exelis Visual Information Solutions. “This is naturally going to require automation of the processes involved.” There is also the question of validating information gleaned from social media, since open sources can also be the perfect tool for disinformation. “There are a number of techniques that can be used to validate OSint,” said Peder Jungck, vice president and chief technology officer at BAE Systems Intelligence and Security. “Keeping track of the history of open source contributors is one way. Validating information with other forms of intelligence is another especially when a new actor comes online. The language of posts can also be analyzed for evidence of deception.” One important aspect of OSint is that most content is accompanied by temporal and/or geospatial metadata, which offer an opportunity to verify accuracy because they allow for an analysis of whether the actor in question was in a position to make his claimed observations. “The way we are dealing with OSint is by treating it as another form of intelligence,” said Mike Manzo, director for GEOINT mission processing and exploitation at General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems. “When detectives interview 10 witnesses, they typically get 10 different viewpoints of a crime, and therein lies the danger of relying on social media. That’s why we roll it up in the processing, exploitation and dissemination cycle so that it becomes a part of an evolving intelligence picture. It can help make decisions on how best to reposition other collection assets to hot spots.” But there are certain aspects of intelligence where OSint has the potential to stand out, notably in sentiment analysis of important populations. Analyzing open source material enables the identification of how key groups feel about certain issues. “This is something you can’t get by taking overhead images,” said Bowersox. “The density and frequency of social media contributions are indicators of what a population is seeing in a particular geographic area and how they feel about it.” “Civil affairs and human terrain teams have as part of their mission the development of a deep understanding of the social and cultural environments in which they operate,” said Raven.
Real-Time Reports Sean Love
Another attribute of social media sources is that they provide real-time reports of activities. www.GIF-kmi.com
“This can contribute to a commander’s situational awareness before we put warfighters in harm’s way,” said Jungck. “The same kind of feeds can be an indicator whether a certain operation is proceeding successfully, also in real time.” “Every transaction on the Internet is related to one or more persons as well as multiple other transactions,” said Frank Purdy, vice president of corporate engagement at Logos Technologies. “Networks are the way organizations operate, including those not friendly to the United States The value of these data sources to solving problems is to get to an anticipatory state of understanding. It is about harvesting knowledge at the pace of the mission.” The challenges associated with incorporating OSint into multi-INT platforms are similar to those involved in fusing other forms of intelligence. “It is very similar to running three disparate sensors on an aircraft that are looking at different things and have different requirements,” said Sean Love, director of business development for integrated intelligence systems at Northrop Grumman. “It’s the same here on the ground. You may have Twitter data combined with standard Web crawler searches, combined with open source geospatial data. They all need a way to talk to each other.” The data from various OSint sources need to be conditioned in order to make them purposeful for analysts. “It is a question of tying all the information together,” said Love, “not just displaying them in the same bucket or showing a series of dots on a map.” “If data from different sources don’t correlate, they won’t provide value,” added Jungck. “Data needs to be cross-referenced. If we have a Tweet coming from a specific location, we need to know what other intelligence sources are observing at that same location. That is also important in validating open source intelligence.” Data from different data sources, including social media platforms, must be normalized so that they can all be used together, noted Bowersox. “They need to be time stamped and geographically co-registered so that data from the same time and place are presented to the analyst,” he said. “Much of this involves standardizing metadata elements.” Incorporating OSint into the multi-INT picture has the effect of benefiting commanders, analysts and warfighters alike, according to Billy Sokol, manager of global C5ISR at MarkLogic. “Open source data can be used to provide feedback and commander’s intent, and to tighten up targeting,” he said. “In other words, how was an operation carried out and did it have its desired effects? For analysts, adding OSint to the common intelligence picture is key to providing an intelligence product that is more meaningful. If you want to reduce the amount of kinetic warfare, you are going to need better a better picture of what is happening on the ground. For the warfighter, because the battlefield is not well delineated, understanding the human terrain is key to interpreting and executing command orders.”
Five Innovations Five technology innovations in recent years are making OSint integration more and more plausible, according to Smith. www.GIF-kmi.com
These include the inexpensive storage of large amounts of data that has been deployed to tackle other big-data problems, as well as the related development of cloud computing infrastructures that accommodate the data analytics. “Natural language processing is another important innovation,” said Smith. “These systems are becoming more and more accurate, and they get better by learning about the language they are analyzing as they go along.” Visualization tools have also made strides in recent times. “Data is useless unless you can turn it into information,” said Smith. “Visualization software is making that happen by being able to understand and characterize large data sets.” Finally, predictive analytics tools are able to make probabilistic determinations about what will happen in the future based on the analysis of the incomplete data sets they have access to. The goal is to get systems to identify open source content that is relevant to policies, decisions and missions against a very noisy background. “At the most basic level, it comes down to trying to plot the information on a map and correlate it geospatially against other data layers, whether imagery or video,” said Bowersox. “Beyond that, there are tools that index and catalog search terms and key works that might be indicative of certain situations.” Northrop Grumman is repurposing some existing tools for use in analyzing open source material. So, for example, a tool used to analyze video streamed from a Global Hawk has been adapted to analyze YouTube videos. “It is a robust tool that we have tweaked for use somewhere else,” said Love. “We are also working on integrating best-ofbreed tools such as those for sentiment analysis and link analysis, and getting them to talk to each other and share data effectively.” Open source intelligence requires that analysts deal with human language, which entails an inherent level of ambiguity. “Instead of trying to derive precise intelligence from these sources, it is smarter to look at the information in a probabilistic manner,” said Raven. “This can involve correlating actions reported in open sources with known activities. Another method is to infer broadly about moods, sentiments, and the likelihood of certain activities occurring by aggregating open source content geospatially.” This type of information, together with data from traditional intelligence sources, can contribute to a new real-time paradigm known as activity-based intelligence. Applying cloud-based infrastructures on the backend, Manzo suggested, will yield two results: Analysts will be able to absorb intelligence in real time, and intelligence users will have a greater opportunity to gain federated access across all forms of intelligence. Such an intelligence model also transforms the jobs of analysts and makes them much more efficient and productive. “This allows them to do more analyzing because they will be spending less time finding relevant data,” said Manzo.
Geospatial Context The technology required to incorporate social media data and other OSint into a multi-INT picture largely exists and is already being used in the commercial world. Retailers, for GIF 12.5 | 21
example, analyze social media feeds in order to understand the needs and wants of their customers at the aggregate level as well as at the individual level. But there are policy considerations that prevent military and intelligence organizations to apply the same technologies in the same manner. “We are scraping tens of millions of sources in real-time and near real-time, including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and many others,” said Brent Bursey, chief executive officer of Great-Circle Technologies, which specializes in the design, development and deployment of multi-INT enabled GEOINT solutions. “We have automated natural language processing and text analytics that are applied to each source in the native language. We support 30 different languages today, but have 190 different languages and dialects on our roadmap. “We are extracting people, places and things associated with activities characterized as topics of interest. We link common concepts across multiple languages to aggregate relevant sources and conversations to describe situations or answer business-centric questions,” Bursey added. Great-Circle Technologies can exploit the geospatial context semantically from social media sources and conflate those with more simplistic geospatial references, such as GPS-derived latitude and longitude, Bursey explained. The company is currently exploiting a universe of structured, unstructured, and semi-structured sources that is approaching
ten petabytes, Bursey added. It also has plans to integrate a wider variety of big data sensor streams that will increase this volume by an order of magnitude. Great-Circle has also proposed establishing a global multilingual and multi-source commercial service that exploits data but delivers it via a fee-for-service model that data answers specific customer questions. The continued incorporation of OSint into multi-INT platforms could stimulate the growth of intelligence as a service in the military and national security realms, much as it is starting to take off in the commercial sector, because the data itself is inherently unclassified. “That is where I think we are headed,” said BAE Systems’ Jungck. “Military and intelligence organizations are going to want to pay for intelligence, rather than data and systems. Our commercial customers want to be provided threat reports. They don’t need to take possession of the data or the analysis. “Intelligence organizations, some of them from the U.S. government, are interested in exploring this model as well,” Jungck added. “The beauty of open source is that you are not using government systems.” O For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup.com or search our online archives for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.
NGA ISSUE
The Magazine of the National Intelligence Community
October 2014 Vol. 12, Issue 7
Cover and In-Depth Interview with:
Brigadier General Mark R. Quantock
Military Deputy National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Who’s Who at National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Features • Imagery Enhancement • Mission Planning
• ISR Data Storage • Feature Extraction
• LiDAR
Insertion Order Deadline: September 23, 2014 • Ad M aterial Deadline: September 30, 2014 22 | GIF 12.5
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Unmanned aerial systems equipped for overhead imaging are poised to bring major changes to the domestic GEOINT field. After providing huge operational benefits to warfighters and transforming ISR technology in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan, unmanned aerial systems (UASs) equipped for overhead imaging and other sensing are poised to bring major changes to the domestic GEOINT field. It is not only that the U.S. fleet of UASs, from Predators and Global Hawks to small hand-launched units, will be returning to CONUS, where they could be available for a variety of military and civilian government missions. In addition, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is www.GIF-kmi.com
By Harrison Donnelly, GIF Editor
moving to allow commercial UAS use domestically beginning next year, ending a longstanding bar on most such deployments. The first concrete step toward domestic UAS use came in June, when the FAA for the first time authorized a commercial UAS operation over land, allowing energy corporation BP and UAS manufacturer AeroVironment to fly an AeroVironment Puma AE for aerial surveys in Alaska. Earlier, the agency had issued certificates to the Puma and Insitu’s Scan Eagle for aerial surveillance over Arctic waters. GIF 12.5 | 23
aerial mapping remote sensing applications, workAs will be true for BP’s use for monitoring pipeing with Sinclair Community College, Woolpert’s lines and roads, most of the tasks carried out by Dayton, Ohio, neighbor, in nearby airspace set commercial UASs will be oriented to the needs of aside for UAS research. such industries as energy, mapping and real estate Woolpert plans to focus its UAS service inidevelopment. But private resources could also tially on smaller projects. “We see deploying this be deployed for key homeland security missions, first for our survey mapping aspects, for examsuch as harbor monitoring, as well as ongoing ple a development of 300 to 500 acres being develmilitary needs in such areas as flood control and oped commercially. That size of an area, which is base construction. typical for engineering development, is almost too Perhaps the most prominent potential use for small for today’s air mapping technology, with its UASs, both commercially operated and returned Jeff Lovin large format cameras and twin engine aircraft, military assets, will be in monitoring the U.S.which are very expensive. You can’t pay for a $1 million sensor Mexico border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection operates a flying 300 acre mapping projects. So what we have been doing fleet of about 10 UASs, and experts say their slow speeds and is trying to do that with boots-on-the-ground survey work. long duration are well suited to such tasks. Moreover, any comAlthough that works because of advances in survey technology, prehensive immigration legislation that emerges from Congress that is where I see UAS technology filling an important niche,” over the next few years is expected to be a compromise combinLovin said. ing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented residents with a “Surveyors will be able to deploy a UAS that will fly a mini substantial increase in funding for border control. aerial mapping mission,” he added. “So a project site that might Still, any surge in domestic UAS use will have to contend with take three days for a multi-person crew can be done in a day or public concern over both the potential privacy and safety impliless with a UAS.” cations of having a lot of remotely piloted vehicles flying over As a mapping firm, Woolpert’s primary UAS sensor will be their heads. While completely unrelated in terms of technology a two-color mapping camera with very high accuracy. For the to recent revelations about government monitoring of communifuture, however, it is looking at the potential for other large cations, domestic UASs may evoke similar feelings of uneasiness format sensors, such as multispectral, which could enable in many people. more robust remote sensing, feature extraction, or thermal applications, as well as small, lightweight light detection and FAA Rules ranging sensors. Although industry had been pressing for relaxation of UAS rules for several years, the key change did not come until 2012, Return Risks when Congress passed legislation directing the FAA to create regulations for domestic use by 2015. While they look forward to expanded UAS use, companies The agency has been laying the groundwork for the change like Woolpert see risks in the return of military assets from since then, issuing various UAS roadmaps and plans and identiSouthwest Asia. Not only could government-provided services fying six locations around the country to operate research cencompete with the private sector, they warn, but also government ters. The pace of activity led some observers to warn that the customers could lose the expertise of their long-term vendors. agency was dragging its feet on the changes, but now most “Being a private sector business owner, I am concerned that in industry feel that new regulations will go into effect as as we pull out of Southwest Asia and bring our assets home, you planned, according to Jeff Lovin, senior vice president and direcare going to start seeing a lot of the military UAS assets deployed tor of geospatial services for Woolpert, a design, geospatial and for civilian purposes. We’ve already run into a few instances of infrastructure firm. that, where an agency that Woolpert has worked with doing air “We’re very hopeful and optimistic that the rulemaking promapping needs now [has] a military aircraft coming in and doing cess will come to fruition and we will get the green flag, so we it,” Lovin said. can start air acquisition next year as planned. There was some “I can understand the benefits of the government working concern, but after attending recent conferences, I think there is a for the government, but that is going to be a challenge,” he congroundswell of interest and input from the industry, and the FAA tinued. “We’ve developed good technologies in this field over the is feeling the pressure. I’m hoping they will stick to their timepast decade, and a lot of those assets are returning to the states. line,” Lovin said. A lot of them will be deployed for civil purposes, where there are The FAA is planning for incremental changes in the regulaalready private sector firms offering those services. tions based on vehicle weight and flight height, with the smallest “Technology developed for war fighting and intelligence colplatforms (under 55 pounds) and lowest altitudes (about 600 feet lection isn’t necessarily the best technology for mapping or flood or less) opened up first. control,” Lovin said. “We’ve been doing this work for 30 to 40 For its first deployment under the new regulations, for years, so we really understand clients’ needs.” O example, Woolpert is currently working on a system based on the Altavian Nova Block III platform, an 11-pound, all-electric, For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly hand-launchable unit, and targeting it for initial applications at harrisond@kmimediagroup.com or search our online archives in the range of 400 feet to 600 feet. The company is conductfor related stories at www.gif-kmi.com. ing accuracy testing and workflow development for detailed 24 | GIF 12.5
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IT Initiative Seen Facing Challenges Intelligence community infrastructure plan advances, but mostly at a crawl. By Harrison Donnelly GIF Editor
While progress is being made, the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (IC ITE) initiative faces a host of challenges as it presses toward the goal of a unified computing infrastructure for the IC by 2018, according to a panel of former federal officials who played key roles in its initial stages.
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The officials—Keith Littlefield, former chief “I believe we still have a significant amount of information officer of the National Geospatialwork to go before we turn the Phase 1 corner. But Intelligence Agency; Barry Barlow, former direcas many people have said, if this was easy to do, it tor of NGA acquisition; and Gus Hunt, former would have been done already. What I’m arguing chief technology officer for the CIA—appeared at for is to take more time up front to make sure we a late-June workshop on the IC ITE sponsored by get this right. We need to crawl and walk in unithe U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. son before we run. And we need to have patience The IC ITE, launched by Director of National and discipline to do that,” Littlefield urged. Intelligence James Clapper in 2011, is aimed at Another key concern is the relationship reducing IT spending by the nation’s 17 intellibetween IC ITE and two Department of Defense gence agencies by 25 percent, while also improvundertakings, the Joint Information Environment Barry Barlow ing information sharing and security. (JIE) and Defense Intelligence Information The initiative comprises 10 components, ranging from a Enterprise (DI2E), both of which are also aimed at establishing cloud environment for the IC to a “mall” of downloadable appli- a common information infrastructure. cations, each of which has been or will be assigned to one or “From a cost perspective, I remain concerned that as we more of the intelligence agencies. The furthest along is a pro- think about IC ITE, JIE and Di2E, the most expensive archigram to create a common computing desktop, which has already tecture to maintain is a hybrid architecture,” said Barlow. been deployed to 5,000 workstations, with plans for 50,000 by “When you take NGA, which has more than 100 deployed locathe end of next year. Some have apparently fallen behind sched- tions, and you have to maintain different security levels, you’re ule, however, while others are developing in ways that skeptics not going to achieve your cost reduction targets if you have to say may be undermining their ultimate effectiveness. maintain separate architectures for JIE, IC ITE and DI2E. The challenge is to bring them together. Leadership Transition “The path they are on with DI2E and JIE is going to get where they need to go, but it’s still going to lead to ineffiMoreover, the leadership of the initiative is in a time of ciencies and gaps. What has to happen over time is a merger transition, as many of the initial developers have retired from of these three environments, or at least some interoperating government service. With the impending retirement of Grant agreements. We’re only a fraction of the way we need to go,” Schneider, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s chief information Barlow added. officer, only Clapper, his chief deputy and Al Tarasiuk, the IC’s Cloud Computing CIO, will be left from among the founding leadership, according to Littlefield. Hunt, meanwhile, emphasized the importance of “Of the seven component pieces of the architecture, five are at the crawl stage,” Littlefield observed. “Only the desktop ini- the enhanced agility and virtually instantaneous access to sertiative is approaching the walk stage, although the Commercial vices provided by cloud computing as a linchpin of success. “The cloud has made it possible for a small investment to Cloud Services program is close behind, and will go live in go a long way, and for a lot of innovations to get started. In the August.” Moreover, he continued, the scheduling slippage has under- past, you had to invest in many things to get started, and the mined the overall strategic approach, which was to establish a money didn’t go as far as you wanted it,” he said, pointing to the first round of projects as a base before moving on to further increased speed of innovation in the commercial IT industry that has been encouraged by the rapid adoption of cloud comstages. “The original assumption was that Phase 1 would inform puting in recent years. “It has become apparent that the innovation cycle of the Phase 2. My concern is that we currently have no complete endto-end look at the performance and metrics across all the IC ITE cloud world was something we needed to get inside of governcomponents to be able to assess the most effective and efficient ment, in order to increase the velocity of innovation and ability to get things done. It also became apparent that we needed ways to scale across the IC,” he said. “I would argue for taking the time to have each area reach to get out of the business of running a commodity infrastructheir initial baseline capability before proceeding with formal ture, and instead focus energy, time and attention on deliverPhase 2 contracts,” Littlefield added. “Without that pragmatic ing capabilities so we could continuously improve intelligence and serial approach, we will have two converging sets of IC ITE capabilities, and turn over the business of running the infracomponents at different levels of maturity forming an as-deliv- structure to people who do it really well,” Hunt said. O ered IOC that was not fully optimized. There are efficiencies that could have been realized that won’t be as a result of this For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly approach, or we will spend significant time and effort addressat harrisond@kmimediagroup.com or search our online archives ing fundamental disconnects as we proceed in a piecemeal for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com. implementation. 26 | GIF 12.5
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GIF RESOURCE CENTER
Compiled by KMI Media Group staff
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Calendar September 15-17, 2014 Air and Space Conference National Harbor, Md. www.afa.org
September 18-19, 2014 Intelligence and National Security Summit Washington, D.C. www.insaonline.org
September 24-26, 2014 Modern Day Marine Quantico, Va. www.marinemilitaryexpos.com
NEXTISSUE
September 2014 Vol. 12, Issue 6
The Magazine of the National Intelligence Community
Cover and In-Depth Interview with:
Al Tarasiuk Chief Information Officer Office of the Director of National Intelligence
Special Report:
IC Information Technology Enterprise
Bonus Interview:
Gus Tavares Chief Technology Officer Defense Intelligence Agency (invited)
Features • Geospatial Cybersecurity • Social Media
• Geospatial Analytics • WorldView-3
• DIA Innovation Gateway
Inserti o n O rder De adline: Au gust 8, 2014 • Ad M aterial De adline: Au gust 15, 2014
www.GIF-kmi.com
GIF 12.5 | 27
INDUSTRY INTERVIEW
Geospatial Intelligence Forum
Marcy Steinke Senior Vice President Government Relations DigitalGlobe Q: Could you tell our readers about the latest developments with DigitalGlobe products and services? A: We strive to proactively provide our customers with valuable data, information and insight that meet their mission requirements today and for the future. DigitalGlobe continues to improve the delivery of the most current, accurate and information-rich commercial satellite imagery to the U.S. government under the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s EnhancedView program. We’re investing in ways to unlock new value for our customer in our information-rich geospatial data and unmatched image library. By combining the power of geospatial imagery with analytics, we help solve complex problems for our military and intelligence customers, allowing decision makers to focus the application of their limited resources. Our expert geospatial analysts employ foundational information, like our Human Landscape data sets, to identify underlying features in the most problematic areas across the globe and provide actionable information where and when it is most needed. We’ll continue to develop innovative solutions, such as our cloud services for mobile information access, predictive analytics and crowdsourcing efforts that allow us to more effectively serve our customers who rely on the high quality and global scale of our capabilities to make decisions that save time, resources and lives. Q: Your newest imaging satellite, WorldView-3, is planned for launch in August. What new and unique capabilities will it provide? A: WorldView-3 will be the first commercial multi-payload, super-spectral, highresolution commercial satellite. Operating at an expected altitude of 617 kilometers, WorldView-3 will capture imagery with 31-cm resolution, which is a native resolution that’s never before been available from a commercial satellite. The satellite’s sensors 28 | GIF 12.5
the terms of our revised license, we will be able to sell imagery with resolution as high as 25 cm beginning six months after the new satellite is operational. Our U.S. government customers will continue to benefit from DigitalGlobe imagery of the highest achievable resolution, and have never been subject to the 50-cm resolution restriction. will also be able to image the earth in 16 spectral bands, ranging from the visible, through near-infrared, to the short-wave infrared (SWIR) parts of the spectrum. The SWIR capability allows for unique military applications such as camouflage detection, trafficability, soil disturbance analysis, identification of ship wakes, and other military applications. WorldView-3 also carries an atmospheric compensation instrument that will mitigate certain challenging environmental conditions to produce more usable and consistent imagery for automated feature extraction and change detection. In the context of our entire constellation, we will soon have six high-resolution imaging satellites in service capable of capturing imagery of anywhere on the globe up to three times per day. WorldView-3 will expand our collection capacity to nearly 4 million square kilometers per day, and our enhanced constellation will set a new technological bar for commercial satellite imagery, offering customers the highest available resolution, revisit rate, capacity and spectral diversity. Q: What does the recent U.S. Department of Commerce decision to relax resolution restrictions mean for the company? A: In June, we received notification from the U.S. Department of Commerce that we would be allowed to sell the best imagery from our current constellation to all of our customers. Previously, non-U.S. government customers were limited to no better than 50-cm resolution without a special waiver. Our constellation today is capable of delivering imagery as sharp as 41 cm. With the launch of WorldView-3, our collection capability will improve to 31-cm resolution. Under
Q: What does all this mean for your government and military customers? A: Due to the hard work and support of our government partners, in particular Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, this sensible and vital regulatory reform will help ensure DigitalGlobe remains a reliable and technologically advanced partner of the U.S. government. This change will also fuel innovation, create new high-tech jobs, and advance the nation’s commanding lead in this strategically important industry. We will continue to provide customers with critical technology advancements, industry-defining information services, and mission-enabling geospatial products for the future. Q: What does the future hold for DigitalGlobe? A: One of the areas we are most excited about is the creation and exploitation of Geospatial Big Data, a living digital inventory of the surface of the earth. We have an archive of earth imagery that goes back 15 years and includes well over 4 billion square kilometers, which when combined with data from many other sources like Human Landscapes, allows us to understand change in a way that no one else can. We’re investing in ways to extract information from our imagery at a global scale and fuse that with other sources of data to deliver actionable intelligence to answer what we call “show me where” questions. These are questions for which you know what you are looking for, but not where to look—for example, show me where the electric grid is most vulnerable to attack, or show me where extremist activity is most likely to occur. O www.GIF-kmi.com
Who says it’s not rocket science? From armed service training to aerospace research to flight simulation to command & control, so many demanding operations have one thing in common. Sony 4K. We’ve delivered more than 15,000 SXRD® 4K projectors worldwide. And now we’re going even further. The award-winning laser light source VPL-GTZ1 ultra-short throw, the high-contrast SRX-T615, and the small-footprint VPL-GT100 join a 4K line that offers unrivaled picture quality, flexible inputs and versatile control software. When it comes to video technology, Sony 4K soars. Register for a demo at sony.com/4Kprojection. © 2014 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Sony and SXRD are trademarks of Sony.