Q&A: DNI Chief Scientist Eric Haseltine
One of the areas we have a lot of progress yet to be made is in technology to enable HUMINT [human intelligence]. I would say that is probably our biggest and most important challenge right now. There are many dimensions in which technology is a huge force multiplier or an obstacle. For example, what is the physical form of HUMINT today? It used to be back in the cloak-and-dagger days of OSS [the World War II Office of Strategic Services] that it was hidden messages or things written on paper or tape recordings or micro-dots. It's the stuff you think of from the old spy movies. Today, it's all bits mostly. It's electronic information because almost all the information that everybody wants to collect is in electronic form today. Can't you see how technology would be of great use in getting to it and once you've gotten it to understand what you've got?
Machine translation, for example–What if we were wildly successful in collecting digital intelligence in HUMINT form. Let's suppose all of that is in a foreign language, which generally it is going to be–How do we pile through all that and see what's useful? As you've probably heard, we have challenges in terms of the number of linguists that we have, so we have to come up with ways of force-multiplying the few linguists that we have.
What other projects are you excited about?
Sometimes our problem isn't that we don't collect information–the problem is the opposite: We collect an incredible amount of information. Then the problem becomes, how do you find the most important stuff and act on it quickly? We have lots of information about terrorists–how do we quickly get to understanding of that information that leads to targeting of them or dealing with them?
What our office has done is go out to the community and find where there were embryonic or nascent development efforts that show promise for attacking that problem. We poured resources and attention on them and have produced some results. I'll give you some examples. There are some people, and I can't say the agency, but they have been doing a lot of work on finding new targets based not on their connection to a known target or a known place but strictly based on their behavior. That is, over a long period of time, when we find bad guys, we then retrospectively go back and say, "How do these people behave?"
If you were a terrorist and you had theories about how good America was at collecting against what you were doing…you would try to avoid them, right? I don't think I'm revealing a whole lot to say that because of leaks and other factors, there is some knowledge about what we can do and what we do do. This does get out there, and people pay attention to it. So when a terrorist tries to avoid us by behaving in ways they believe will get around us, that in and of itself can leave a signature. That's the sort of thing that we've been doing.
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