Q&A: DNI Chief Scientist Eric Haseltine
It's good inertia in the sense that it gives you stability once you have a weapons system or a collection system, but it's bad in that, what if technology has passed you up? Moore's Law says that technology is going to double every 18 months. Does the capability of the intelligence community double every 18 months? No! And that's the problem. Even worse, some of our adversaries are on that much-faster curve. The terrorists are extremely innovative in the use of the Internet, not only for the way they communicate and coordinate but also how they get out their information messages, their propaganda. Like one of the generals in Iraq said–he viewed IEDs as a media event. They take pictures of them, they get it out there and it helps recruit, it helps sustain their momentum, and they understand that.
So if I have a single concern, it comes back to my overwhelming focus on speed–we must, must, must, get much more agile! And I'm not here to tell you that we're anywhere close to being where we need to be, and that's why I keep harping on that as an issue.
What is disposable technology?
Instead of having to plan for something's life cycle over 15 years or 20 years or 30 years, you say "No!" we're going to adopt a technology and we're going to get rid of it in two years. If you want to innovate fast, you have to obsolete fast. Because everything that you have on the shelf occupies space that something else can't take, so you have to constantly get rid of stuff.
I think that's an interesting metaphor for what's happened with the terrorists. These are bright, tech-savvy, young men, who really understand this stuff, doing very smart things with technology. They don't have to hold on to technology for 15 years. When there's something cooler, they toss out what they have and then get the next best thing.
I think there are ways, if we get really creative, at doing this. What I noticed over in Iraq when I went out on conveys is people used some stuff they just went and bought in the PX. They used these push-to-talk radios, they did all kinds of stuff they weren't supposed to do. Well, you know, I think we need to take a hard look at that.
We have to have lots of arrows in the quiver. We need to have things that surprise our adversaries. And sometimes surprise is only achieved by speed and agility.
What are you doing about information overload in the community?
At every level of the intelligence enterprise, whether it's collection or analysis or distribution or consumption of intelligence, at every stage of that pipeline, you have way more data than any stage can deal with. We inundate our customers with way more stuff than they can digest. How do we give them stuff in a way that they know what the good stuff is? That probably is a problem that will be with us forever. The more successful we are at collecting against hard targets, the more we're going to have that problem of what do we now do with the stuff we've collected.
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