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STATE OF GEOINT REPORT 2015
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2015 State of GEOINT Report
Published by
The United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation
© Copyright 2015 USGIF. All Rights Reserved.
What’s Hot It’s Not Open Source, It’s the Real World. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Data: The Hottest Trend in the Geospatial Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
GEOINT: So What & Now What? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
What’s Not Intelligence Stovepipes are Dying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
What’s on the Horizon The Clouds and Crowds in Our Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
The Visualization Imperative: Transformation in Conveying GEOINT Content . . . . . . 16
Human-centric Data Immersion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Data Privacy and Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
The Transition of GEOINT to a Market-Directed Model – Crisis or Opportunity?. . . . 23
GEOINT at a Crossroads: A View from the Federal Sector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
STATE OF GEOINT REPORT 2015
Established in 2004 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, non-lobbying
educational foundation, the United States Geospatial
Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) has provided leadership
to the GEOINT discipline via the three pillars that define
USGIF’s goals: Build the Community | Advance the
Tradecraft | Accelerate Innovation.
USGIF’s mandate to foster the once emerging and now
prevalent discipline of geospatial intelligence and to
support professionalization of the GEOINT workforce is
realized through myriad events and activities. Whether
at networking events such as GEOINTeraction Tuesday,
professional development opportunities with the USGIF
Young Professionals Group, educational activities such as
hands-on training sessions, or large-scale, community-
wide events like the annual GEOINT Symposium, USGIF
is recognized as the convening authority for the broader
GEOINT Community. This is evidenced in part by the
breadth of military, government, industry, and academic
participation across all Foundation activities—to include
this inaugural State of GEOINT report.
This year the report focuses on acquisition processes and
the use of open-source intelligence for decision-making.
Next year, it will include more technical papers as USGIF
works to inform its Universal GEOINT Credentialing
program. I believe the State of GEOINT report will provide
the community with a vehicle to annually calibrate and
take stock of the changes and trends in the international
GEOINT Community. The need for this approach is
reflected in the global nature of USGIF’s members and
stakeholders. Participants in the 2015 report are thought
leaders in a broad range of GEOINT-related specialties,
and we are pleased with the insights they developed and
captured in the following pages.
USGIF strives for the highest quality in all of its endeavors,
and the 2015 State of GEOINT report is a wonderful
example of this commitment to excellence. Based on this
inaugural report’s success, we expect an even greater
number of participants and entries in the years to come. I
am hopeful this document will stimulate rich discussions
about the current and future state of GEOINT.
Sincerely,
Keith J. Masback
CEO, USGIF
What is the current “State of GEOINT” and what waits on the horizon? The answers are essential for professional agility in an era of accelerated GEOINT innovation. The United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) presents this report to help answer these questions and support GEOINT Community interests and professional requirements.
The compilation of this inaugural report began with a diverse gathering of more than 50 geospatial intelligence practitioners Oct. 7, 2014, at the Hyatt Dulles in Herndon, Va. Participants were from academia, U.S. government, and large and small businesses. All business participants were USGIF members, and all academic participants were representatives of USGIF-accredited colleges and universities. Government participation ranged widely from uniformed military personnel and U.S. Intelligence Community employees to U.S. federal civil agency practitioners.
Participants were asked to think through a series of open-ended exercises and define which GEOINT topics, concepts, and challenges they consider at the forefront of their professions— these were categorized as “Hot” topics in GEOINT. Next, a similar exercise was conducted to determine what issues, policies, practices, or technologies are considered on the decline or are expected to depreciate in the next three to five years—these items were termed “Not Hot” topics. A final brainstorming session explored what is “On the Horizon” for GEOINT professionals.
A richness of ideas emerged from this intellectually robust environment, with a great range of perspectives recorded on easel pads, notepads, tablets, and laptops. We asked attendees to continue the dialogue over the next several weeks and, using teams formed throughout their day at the Hyatt, write short essays to capture the essence of their discussions. These essays form the basis of this 2015 State of GEOINT report. I envision this activity to become a key part of USGIF’s annual events. Compiling the report not only gives the GEOINT Community an opportunity to tell USGIF what is happening, but provides information to shape the Foundation’s nascent Universal GEOINT Credentialing program, helping point the way to new ideas, technologies, and tradecraft.
This year will be an exciting one for USGIF. Our Universal GEOINT Credentialing program is in development and will be rolled out during 2015. We have spent more than a year developing a GEOINT essential body of knowledge with practitioner contributions from defense, law enforcement, and U.S. intelligence as well as from the first responder, agriculture, oil and gas, mining and mineral extraction, and broader business communities. This essential body of knowledge will be used as the basis to develop a set of GEOINT credentials.
Some would ask, “Why a new geospatial credential?” It is a great question, which I am always happy to address. As a result of a confluence of technologies, the rise of ubiquitous computing power, global networks, and geospatial science and technologies that are available to a wider range of practitioners than ever before, there is a new model for the geospatial practitioner. New tools and data sources pop up seemingly overnight. For example, the number of geospatially aware apps on our smartphones is growing at an exponential rate. Nearly every new app leverages location-aware, smart-device capabilities. However, creating the underlying infrastructure, maps, and analytic tools needed within this ecosystem requires GEOINT professionals. Central to GEOINT we have imagery and sensor data. Increasingly, we also have geolocated social media and GPS enabled information. A picture paints a thousand words and the use of imagery, both
literal and derived, coupled with other sources to answer a question is what makes GEOINT a unique discipline.
And GEOINT extends beyond imagery, features, and attributes. The professional practice of GEOINT includes the synthesis and analysis required to make sense of all data, including increasing quantities of open-source data available via a wide range of social media outlets. To understand, use, and explain analyses of disparate data and information to resolve complex challenges requires depth and breadth of both skills and domain knowledge. Certainly, parts of GEOINT are the specific domains of the GIS practitioner, the remote sensing professional, the IT guru, the business analyst, and the social media or data science expert. But bringing all of these disciplines together is at the heart of GEOINT—GEOINT is synthesis. It breathes through powerful collaboration, using place and time as its organizing principles. It grows as technology advances. And it requires practitioners to be open to change—all the time!
A few comments on the content of this publication. It is our intent that the Community organically develop the imaginative ideas that appear in this and subsequent State of GEOINT reports. We harnessed the experience of our Community, but did not attempt to cover all possible topics because the world of GEOINT is simply too large. Additionally, the hard-hitting nature of each article did not provide the opportunity to delve deeply into technical subject matter. However, just below the surface of the topics addressed you will find rich technical detail, which we plan to explore more thoroughly in future volumes.
There are obvious GEOINT trends that are noticeably absent from this volume, including the rise of small satellites and unmanned aerial systems as sensor platforms and how, analytically, we will handle the current crush of available data. In a way, we have come full circle. GEOINT was born when government collection systems were more prevalent than commercial collections. Now, both platforms and sensors have become commodities and we frequently struggle to make sense out of all the available data choices.
I invite each of you to join the discussion of how we can together build a stronger global GEOINT Community. Get involved. Join and actively participate in USGIF working groups, committees, and credentialing focus groups. Attend GEOINT Foreword and the GEOINT 2015 Symposium in the early summer or GEOINT Community Week in the fall. Experience USGIF workshops and networking events throughout the year. Strengthen your capabilities through the wide variety of training opportunities available from USGIF and our GEOINT Community partners. Enroll in USGIF-accredited colleges and universities. Become a mentor to promising young GEOINTers. Volunteer at STEM events in your area. And if you have an idea for a new USGIF initiative, please let us know. All it takes is a good idea and your focused energy to make things happen.
Thank you to everyone who has made this report possible. It is our intent to have a “State of GEOINT” event and publication each year. If you are interested in being invited to this fun and rewarding community event in 2015, please let me know.
Working together, 2015 can be our year of making a difference.
Darryl G. Murdock, Ph.D.
Vice President of Professional Development, USGIF 703-793-0109 ext. 128 (office) 703-463-7868 (mobile) [email protected]
Acknowledgements The United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation
(USGIF) would like to thank the GEOINT Community
representatives from government, academia, and industry
who participated in this first-ever State of GEOINT report.
The all-day exercise with more than 50 participants from
varying agencies, industries, backgrounds, and experience
identified a variety of trends on both the rise and decline.
We sincerely appreciate you dedicating time away from
the office to help uncover and articulate key themes in the
articles that appear in the following pages.
USGIF would also like to thank key staff that made the State
of GEOINT event and publication possible. Justin Franz,
professional development administrative coordinator, and
Ayana Nickerson, credentialing manager, helped organize
and facilitate the in-person gathering of the GEOINT
Community. Dr. Maxwell Baber, Ph.D., director of academic
programs, was instrumental in reviewing, selecting, and
shaping the submissions from the various participant groups.
USGIF would also like to thank Kristin Quinn, editorial
director; Lindsay Mitchell, marketing & communications
assistant; and Jordan N. Fuhr, vice president of strategic
communications & marketing, for editing the report and
managing its publication and distribution.
Authors Christopher L. Anderson
Todd S. Bacastow
Keith L. Barber
Michael J. Campanelli
Jeff E. DeTroye
Vincent A. DiNoto Jr.
Steven D. Fleming
Douglas M. Flewelling
Jack Hild
Bill Hodge
Colleen McCue
Robert V. Mott
Katherine Hibbs Pherson
Cordula A. Robinson
Lisa Spuria
Robert R. Tomes
Robert Zitz
Additional Contributors David Alexander
Nate Copeland
Anne L. Downs
Phillip Ferro
Steven Handwerk
Steven A. Israel
Robert Koster
Victor H. Leonard
Skip Maselli
Timothy C. Matisziw
Daniel T. Maxwell
Bruce F. Molnia
John Oswald
Erford E. Porter III
Eileen M. Preisser
Fang Qui
William Sheridan
Rebecca Somers
Carl Stuekerjuergen
Barry C. Tilton
Neill Tipton
Don Vance
Cuizhen (Susan) Wang
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WHAT’S HOT | 5
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WHAT’S HOT
It’s Not Open Source, It’s the Real World
If Anyone Can See It,
Is It Intelligence?
The senior intelligence official pours over the latest
information gleaned from highly classified images,
signals, and clandestine human sources engaged in
foreign espionage. He’s only got an hour to finalize
what will be compiled, formatted, and delivered to
“customer No. 1” at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. He
furrows his brow, knowing the President of the United
States and the National Security Council may have as
many questions regarding sources not contained in the
President’s Daily Brief (PDB) as they have about those
that are. With this in mind, the senior asks his PDB
analyst about the status of an important foreign facility
of current interest.
The analyst clears his throat and says, “Sir, I know
you are interested in that topic but we have no new
information.” The senior replies, “Look over your
shoulder.” The screen behind the analyst shows a live
cable news broadcast regarding the facility halfway
around the world.
The intelligence official presents the daily intelligence
update and then returns to the Intelligence Community
with new questions, and the daily cycle begins anew.
Meanwhile, our nation’s decision-makers are inundated
throughout their day with real-time information from
numerous Internet sources: professional and amateur
news aggregators, individual bloggers, tweets, videos,
images, instant messages, and myriad other means to
continuously send and receive information about the
world.
Why has it been so difficult for the Intelligence
Community to integrate real-time open sources into its
daily analytical workflow? Why hasn’t the intelligence
information technology enterprise been designed to
merge these data sources, and what can be done?
Understanding the history and cultural barriers is
the first step to acceptance of the problem. After
acceptance comes problem resolution.
If Anyone Could Do It,
It Wouldn’t be Special
Throughout history, timely insight into what one’s
adversaries (and competitors) may be planning or
doing has been considered intelligence and integral to
survival. Since the success or failure of an adversary’s
plans depends upon going undiscovered for a period
of time, barriers are erected to keep enemies or
other untrusted parties at a distance. By the Cold
War era, the U.S. had closed borders, limited lines of
communication, and carefully regulated transportation.
We also witnessed the rise of highly classified global
remote sensing as a response to these barriers.
Highly specialized technical intelligence collection and
analysis disciplines flourished to augment difficult and
risky human collection. Highly specialized intelligence
systems came with highly sensitive security clearances,
and a high bar of personal character and integrity was
rightly set to obtain these accesses. Once obtained,
intelligence officers devoted their time to unique and
classified sources.
Meanwhile, Things Changed
Since the Cold War ended, the explosion of the
Internet, computer processing, communications
bandwidth, technology miniaturization, and advanced
manufacturing has radically changed the world’s
information flow. There are now 2.8 billion users of the
Internet worldwide, including more than 240 million in
Africa and more than 100 million in the Middle East
alone. Today, there are more than 180 million active
websites, and every second nearly 24 terabytes of
information—or 24 trillion bytes—traverse the Internet.
That single second of Internet traffic includes about
7,800 tweets, 1,400 Instagram photos, 1,500 Tumblr
posts, and 1,500 Skype calls. It is estimated roughly
one hour of video footage, much of it geotagged, is
uploaded every second. During that same second,
46,000 Google searches are launched. Simultaneously,
an estimated 12,000 television channels and 44,000
radio stations are operating around the world. As
worldwide information flow became real-time and
ubiquitous, print media, including monthly news
| 2015 STATE OF GEOINT REPORT6
magazines and daily newspapers, suffered significant
readership and advertising losses. The companies and
organizations surviving have done so by keeping pace
with their customers’ needs: compressed timelines,
aggregated information, real-time “tipping and cueing”
to other sources of information, and content available
to the consumer wherever they are and via the platform
of their choosing.
Changing the Intelligence
Community Culture
Fully integrating the real-time flow of publicly available and
searchable information into the Intelligence Community’s
analytical realm ultimately means changing the overall
systems architecture to perform integrated tasking,
ingest, processing, correlation, enrichment, change
detection, alerting, and analytics of both classified and
unclassified sources. But moving in this direction will
require a significant mindset shift that recognizes openly
available information as holding value equal to traditional
classified sources. This cultural change must occur
not with the young analysts who want access to more
information—the change is needed at the mid-to-senior
levels in order to place priority and funding support
behind the technical needs required to seamlessly
integrate information streams. Cultural change is needed
to help inform security policy decisions as well. For
example, changing long-held views among policy staff
that technical solutions do not exist to prevent “spillage”
of classified information into unclassified systems.
However, helping mid-level and senior managers through
the cultural change is problematic because the majority
spent their formative years “behind the green door” and
without the benefits of the Internet. Many managers do
not appreciate what their newest analysts know. They
walk away from the vast majority of real-time global
information flow once they park their car and turn off and
stow their smartphones.
The GEOINT Community is Uniquely
Positioned to Lead this Change
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
has a history and tradition of incorporating openly
available, unclassified, and commodity data into
its product lines. For decades it has entered into
government-to-government and government-to-
commercial agreements for unclassified geospatial
data sets, including commodity purchases of location
data. NGA led the integration of commercial imagery
into the Intelligence Community and its customer base
against the skepticism of traditionalists who thought only
intelligence satellites could produce imagery of value.
NGA also fostered key technical advances in the open
arena, including funding a development via In-Q-Tel,
which led to what is now Google Earth—an open system
used by more than 1 billion people around the world.
NGA is uniquely positioned to lead the Intelligence
Community to seamless integration of open sources
for additional reasons. More and more of the billions
of images and millions of videos being uploaded to
the web are geo-referenced, and a growing number of
smartphones and other handheld devices now provide
location information. Then there is NGA’s role as the
glue that puts other INTs in perspective. It is often
said GEOINT is the foundation that provides context
for all other intelligence sources. Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper has noted, “Everything and
everyone must be somewhere.” This context-building
role made NGA the champion for multi-INT efforts across
the IC, and is still the reason NGA plays a central role in
persistent surveillance, activity-based intelligence (ABI),
and the Intelligence Community Information Technology
Enterprise (IC ITE) transformation.
Conclusion
Outside the confines and restrictions of heavily
guarded SCIFs, the world’s real-time information flow
has eclipsed anyone’s imagination. As intelligence
professionals, we must seek knowledge from any
source and provide our customers with insightful
analysis that incorporates a healthy awareness of
our adversaries’ denial and deception capabilities in
the open source and multi-INT environments. To be
truly effective, multi-INT, persistent surveillance, and
ABI must rely on the real-time flow of all sources of
information, including that which is openly available.
These driving initiatives and convergence of the
heretofore stovepiped IT architectures into IC ITE
provide the needed push to change our culture and
systems architecture. Now is the time to fully integrate
openly available sources, and enable the IC workforce
to access the real world.
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WHAT’S HOT | 7
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Data: The Hottest Trend in the
Geospatial Industry Geospatial data is hardly a happy hour topic. So why
would one choose data as a “hot” geospatial topic to
write about when there are so many other headline-
grabbers to consider? SmallSats, Big Data, the cloud,
and UAVs are all much more interesting … Geospatial
Data? Really?
And yet satellites and drones collect geospatial data,
data is stored in the cloud, and, well, Big Data is ...
data. While the media has changed, the fundamentals
of geospatial data haven’t changed since the first
cave drawings showed where the bad tribe lived. But
now, the way some spatial data is being generated by
volunteers is unique and groundbreaking. And that’s how
geospatial data earned its place in the “What’s Hot”
category. In a 2007 article, Michael Goodchild wrote:
“... the widespread engagement of large
numbers of private citizens, often with
little in the way of formal qualifications, in
the creation of geographic information,
a function that for centuries has been
reserved to of f ic ia l agencies. They
are largely untrained and their actions
are almost always voluntary, and the
results may or may not be accurate. But
collectively, they represent a dramatic
innovation that will certainly have profound
impacts on geographic informat ion
systems (GIS) and more generally on the
discipline of geography and its relationship
to the general public. I term this volunteered
geographic information (VGI) …”
Since then, OpenStreetMap (OSM) has grown
significantly in terms of coverage and quality. Spatial
content mined from social media has been an
information treasure trove for marketers and observers
of social unrest in Northern Africa, the Middle East,
and Hong Kong. Geospatial crowdsourcing is the most
recent innovation where statistical techniques are used
to validate the crowd. One notable example of the
widespread interest can be seen in the more than three
million people who logged into a popular portal to help
look for the lost Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Not since commercial satellite imagery and satellite
navigation data have we seen such an explosion of
spatial content. But how good is this content? Unlike
imagery and satellite navigation data, social media
and crowdsourcing efforts are not aligned to traditional
data quality rules. More mature efforts such as OSM
apply some formatting and metadata standards, but
consistency among original data producers can vary
widely. While there is elegance in the relative simplicity
of OSM, most authoritative producers are uncertain
about VGI quality. Crowdsourcing efforts are elegant
in their own way. If collection labor is volunteered,
why not collect many times, compare the results,
and statistically select the most frequent answers?
Certainly, with a large enough sample size over every
point on the Earth you could expect great data quality,
but we’re not there—yet. So how can social media and
crowdsourced information—two promising sources of
data—cross the threshold to become credible primary
sources for national mapping organizations? This
question is at the heart of why data and data quality
belong on any geospatial “hot” list.
No discussion of the value of social media and
crowdsourced data would be complete without
acknowledging the risk of geo-spoofing. Could the
crowd intentionally provide bad content in volumes
significant enough to be credible? Could a bad actor
promulgate bad location through Twitter in significant
enough numbers to cause analysts to be misled?
It would be naive to dismiss this risk. The current
risk is not sufficient to avoid using social media and
crowdsourced data but continued vigilance is strongly
encouraged.
So far we have discussed two new data sources as
alternatives to traditional primary sources of geospatial
data. Perhaps a different perspective is needed. What
if the world was mapped, given all currently available
information, and all we were really interested in was
maintaining it?
The objections of those reading this are deafening:
“What does ‘done’ mean? It can never be done.”
Before you judge the concept as completely
insane, let’s look at hydrographic charting. National
hydrographic organizations have been cooperating
since 1889 with what is now the International
Hydrographic Organization, which was formed nearly
a century ago. Generally the seas are well charted,
enough that one could say the task at hand is simply
| 2015 STATE OF GEOINT REPORT8
maintaining the data. In fact, in many ways, near
real-time hydrographic chart maintenance has been
crowdsourced for decades. Hazard to navigation
broadcasts have been operated by many nations for
years with less critical maintenance performed on a
monthly basis. The entire maritime community has
played a role in data maintenance with a long tradition
of volunteered contributions to the chart updating
process. Today, some nations have abandoned the
monthly, postal service-dependent process by posting
“notices to mariners” to the web nearly as soon as
they are received. So, it’s safe to say three-fourths of
our world is charted and that, in many ways, critical
locations and/or features are maintained rapidly.
So now comes the chorus of, “But geospatial data on
land is far more complex than a mostly flat, featureless
ocean.” No doubt this is true and maintenance is a near
impossible task if you try to apply traditional sources
and processes. But we have many new sources. Does
that change tradition? Did aerial imagery change
mapping? With the explosion of crowdsourced data,
commercial imagery, and location data over the last
decade, how can it not have an effect on our traditional
data compilation and maintenance processes?
Can similar methods be applied to spatial content
on land? In fact, the United Kingdom’s Ordnance
Survey (OS) accomplishes this to a degree today.
Its OS MasterMap has stringent timelines for the
inclusion of changes. As such, changes are validated
and posted quickly in a near-transactional process. A
vision of “transactionally” maintained geospatial data
doesn’t scale to the world—yet. But it’s time to test a
process that can rapidly consume the explosion of new
sources. If Visa can process several hundred million
transactions per day, certainly we can target a few
thousand geospatial transactions per day for a pilot
maintenance test.
The OS example almost always elicits a comment such
as, “But the UK is so small we could never do that in
the U.S.” The UK has a very efficient process relative
to the U.S. and probably uses far less resources per
square mile than we do. Consider the following list of
domestic geospatial producers:
• Federal – USGS, Census, DHS, DoT, NGA, EPA,
plus hundreds of small GIS support organizations
• State and Regional – Planning, development,
infrastructure management, etc.
• Regional and Tribal – Planning, development,
permitting, infrastructure management, etc.
• Commercial – Location-based services and the
base data needed to make the services work
Does anyone doubt there are sufficient resources
available if we all work together?
Here is an outline of how the U.S. government could
launch a pilot program:
• Identify a small to mid-size country where there is
enough interest (committed GEOINT resources) to
warrant a pilot program. Afghanistan, Iraq, or Iran
might be good choices.
• Complete a country-level vector and imagery
database with the most accurate and current data
available. The decisions here should not be onerous
as omissions can be recovered in the maintenance
process. There are sufficient standards and GIS
technology in place to get started.
• Dedicate a team of maintainers with 20 to 30 initially
dropping down to five to 10 in a year. Include
developers on the team and adopt agile methods
to rapidly update processes. Also include a social
media-mining expert.
• Organize in an operations center environment. The
team needs to be fixated on maintaining the most
current and comprehensive operational picture
possible.
• Set a requirement that changes will be incorporated
into the database 24 hours after a new source is
received. At a minimum include every image, every
mission-specific database, every Modernized
Integrated Database update, and every OSM update.
• Use change detection techniques to target areas
for tasking in the broadest sense, including new
imagery perhaps, targeted crowdsourcing through
a commercial provider, or social media mining.
• Develop internal “community sourcing.” The DoD
and IC have a wealth of local knowledge. Enlist a
crowdsourcing entity to help develop “our crowd”
into “our community.”
It is hoped that this paper helps ignite a desire not just
to leverage the explosion of new sources available to
the GEOINT Community, but to also think about new
ways to apply them alongside more traditional sources.
It’s time for the terrestrial geospatial community to
take some wind from the mariner’s sails and see if the
accelerating availability of sources can be incorporated
into a continuously maintained spatial database. It’s
important to start the experiment.
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WHAT’S HOT | 9
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GEOINT: So What & Now What? Socrates said, “Wisdom begins with the definition
of terms.” The definition of geospatial intelligence,
or GEOINT, as termed in this article, creates the
discipline’s identity, defines the responsibilities, and
establishes expectations—in short, it creates the
profession. For those in training and education, the
definition frames the curriculum, and ultimately, the
preparation of the GEOINT professional.
The U.S. Government Code Title 10 definition of
GEOINT is tied to the creation of the discipline and
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).
This agency was formed to integrate information,
intelligence, and tradecrafts under a single discipline
named by then-NGA Director James Clapper. It is worth
noting the name of the agency includes a hyphen, so
what might be “NGIA” is referred to today as NGA. It
has been suggested this was done to give parity with
the agency’s three-letter counterparts such as FBI,
CIA, DIA, NSA, and NRO. It’s not difficult to imagine
internal politics influenced not only in the name, but
also the scope of the discipline that emerged from the
Title 10 definition of GEOINT.
While the government defined GEOINT in order
to describe NGA’s mission with respect to other
U.S. intelligence agencies, the discipline itself has
broader applications. A global revolution of geospatial
information science, technologies, and data has created
the opportunity to apply GEOINT in other fields. Other
domains such as public safety, homeland security,
disaster management, and business are leveraging
geospatial information to provide an advantage to
decision-makers, thereby creating GEOINT. However,
Title 10 limits U.S. government agencies other than
NGA from explicitly producing GEOINT products. As a
result, other government agencies produce essentially
the same information under different names. Redefining
the term “geospatial intelligence” is necessary to allow
the discipline to be applied more broadly and include
the hidden GEOINT Community outside the narrow
intent of Title 10. With this expansion, it is important to
examine and understand what GEOINT has become
beyond the constraints of its original definition.
What is GEOINT?
Let’s begin by examining the terms that comprise
GEOINT.
“Geospatial” pertains to or relates to
the relative position of things (spatial) of
(e.g., in/on/around) our Earth (geo).
Intelligence is actionable information about
both the physical (landscape) and human
activity that provides necessary insights
(data needs) to a decision-maker.
Expanding upon the word “geospatial”—while the
words geospatial, geographic, and spatial are often
used interchangeably to mean similar things—
the reasoning behind the linguistic blend forming
“geospatial” is that “spatial” alone is too generic and
“geographic” is too related to the particular discipline
of “geographic intelligence,” one of the oldest forms of
military intelligence.
Expanding upon the word “intelligence,” intelligence
provides a “decision advantage” intended to prevent
surprise, capitalize on emerging opportunities,
neutralize threats, or provide time to adapt to a
changing situation.
GEOINT has the following qualities that help to
determine where it can be applied: A decision
advantage resulting from insights gained through
place and time; and an integration of knowledge
from Geographic Information Science (GIScience),
geographic technologies, and GEOINT tradecraft.
| 2015 STATE OF GEOINT REPORT10
Place: Place is a fundamental concept in geography
and the most important GEOINT concept. At first glance,
location and place seem to be similar terms. Location
is a coordinate on the Earth’s grid with values for x,
y, and z. However, places have physical and human
attributes that make them what they are. Physical
attributes may include a description of such things as
the mountains, rivers, beaches, and topography of a
place. Human characteristics may include the human-
designed cultural features of a place, from land use and
architecture, to forms of livelihood and religion, to food
and folkways, to transportation and communication
networks. Place emphasizes the understanding of both
of these factors and their integration.
Places are building blocks of analysis in GEOINT—keys
to making sense of the landscape, stages for events,
and testimonial to the fact that humans require space to
live, work, play, and flourish. People create distinctive
places according to their knowledge, technology, and
needs. Places are involved in important personal,
corporate, and governmental decisions. Places
exemplify the principle events of history. Understanding
a place’s history, variety, and complexity, and how that
place may have shaped a human’s life and experiences
is key to cultural understanding.
Ultimately, in the practice of GEOINT we are concerned
with understanding why places, and the people in
those places, are located where they are. We must be
comfortable with the underlying concepts and theories
of the spatial distribution of a particular phenomenon.
Spatial distributions can reveal a relationship between
nature and society, such as hurricane hazards as linked
to potential deaths, or as a reflection of topography
and socioeconomic processes associating particular
places to particular kinds of people and architectures.
Spatial distributions can also be strictly human
phenomena, such as population and religion.
The practice of GEOINT means you are analyzing
something within all of its contexts—physical,
spatial, historical, cultural, and political. For example,
populations, evacuations, crime, and retail stores all
exist or occur in a particular place or at a particular time
for a set of specific reasons. Applying a geographic
perspective improves understanding of what things
are, where they are located, why they are located there,
how they came to be, and why they change, while
providing a framework to understand anything that has
a spatial component.
Time: Place and time are inexorably linked. Swedish
geographer Torsten Hägerstrand emphasized the
importance of time in human activity and how human
spatial activity is often governed by time limitations. He
identified three categories of limitations:
• Capability constraints refer to the limitations
on human movement as a result of physical
or biological factors.
• A coupling constraint refers to the need to be in
one particular place for a given length of time,
often in interaction with other people.
• The authority constraint is a controlled area that
sets limit on its access to particular individuals.
Hägerstrand’s space-time model provides a framework
for understanding human activity in space, and
provides a theoretical foundation for intelligence
concepts such as Activity-Based Intelligence (ABI).
GIScience: Geographic Information Science
(GIScience), and its parent discipline geography,
is about ways of looking at and understanding the
world. When you view the world through the lens of
geography, you answer the questions of where things
are located on the Earth, how places differ from one
another, how people interact with the environment, and
why people are located where they are.
Looking “under the hood” of the discipl ine of
geography, it has a number of branches and subfields.
The two main branches of geography are physical
geography and human geography—in that order. One
must understand the physical Earth first before one
can attempt to understand how humans live upon
it. From a U.S. Department of Defense perspective,
physical geographers and physical geography are
closely associated with traditional military geography
and terrain analysis. Here, geographers investigate the
effects of weather, climate, landforms, vegetation, soils,
and water bodies on military activity. Human geography
is concerned with critical aspects of humanitarian and
defense activities, such as how people and their activity
are distributed in space, how people use and perceive
space, and how places on Earth impact humans, and,
in turn, how humans impact places.
The concept of human geography has existed for
centuries. The importance of understanding the socio-
cultural aspects of societies is necessary for success
across a range of humanitarian, public safety, business,
and defense endeavors. Cultural awareness provides
an important human context. At the strategic level,
human geography provides a backdrop that describes
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the socio-cultural undercurrents that limit options
and define goals. At the tactical level, socio-cultural
dynamics impact interpersonal communications and
relationships that enable or prevent attainment of goals.
Tradecraft: Distinctive tradecraft makes GEOINT
unique within the discipline of geography and
differentiates it from other activities utilizing GIScience
and geographic technologies. Historically, intelligence
agencies use the term “tradecraft” to refer to the
techniques or methods by which an agency conducts
its business. The term conjures up images of a
craftsman or a skilled artisan, but it also describes the
undisclosed techniques and wisdom handed down
from one generation to the next. The word “tradecraft”
when applied to GEOINT reflects the exclusivity and
the non-scientific aspect of an analyst’s sources and
methods. As a tradecraft, GEOINT depends on the
technical and cognitive capabilities handed down from
one generation of analysts to the next.
To many people, the intelligence tradecraft is about
secrets and spying. However, according to noted
author, academic, and experienced national security
expert, Mark Lowenthal, viewing intelligence as
primarily secrets misses the important point that
intelligence is ultimately information that meets the
needs of a decision-maker. While we agree with
this viewpoint, it is important to appreciate that any
decision advantage disappears if you indiscriminately
give your insights, sources, or methods to others.
As such, GEOINT, by the nature of its purpose—which
is to achieve an information advantage—may require
sources and methods that are secret. Secrecy is the
practice of hiding information and methods from
certain individuals or groups, perhaps while sharing
it with other certain individuals. Although sometimes
controversial, information secrecy is normal, frequently
essential, and often required in aspects of our daily lives.
It is not a concept that only applies where governments
conceal information from other governments. Nature
evokes secrecy when animals conceal their location
from predators. Sports teams keep their playbooks
secret from the opposition. Secrecy of one’s vote is a
basic right in many societies. Business organizations
keep secrets for competitive advantage or to meet
legal requirements. Trade secret laws protect new
products under development, unique manufacturing
techniques, or lists of customers. Secrets are normal
and part of GEOINT as it is practiced outside NGA.
Now What?
We suggest adopting a broader, community-wide
definition of GEOINT. We appreciate the challenge
of achieving a new definition everyone will agree on
since GEOINT can be used to describe a knowledge
artifact, a process, and a discipline. This difficulty
notwithstanding, we suggest a broader definition
of GEOINT as a means to guide the training and
education of the geospatial professional. The proposed
definition we suggest is:
GEOINT is act ionable knowledge, a
process, and a profession. It is the ability
to describe, understand, and interpret so
as to anticipate the human impact of an
event or action within a spatiotemporal
environment. It is also the ability to identify,
collect, store, and manipulate data to
create geospatial knowledge through
critical thinking, geospatial reasoning,
and analytical techniques. Finally, it is the
ability to present knowledge in a way that
is appropriate to the decision-making
environment.
We hope this definition of GEOINT frames a curriculum
to meet tomorrow’s educational challenges.
| 2015 STATE OF GEOINT REPORT12
What’s Not Hot
Intelligence Stovepipes are Dying
A World Brimming With Danger
and Changing Through Technology
Today’s global enemies present a complex set of
challenges to the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC)
and Department of Defense (DoD). At one end of the
spectrum, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL) is aggressive, unpredictable, and deploys violent
tactics that have horrified the civilized world. On the
other, the recent Ebola outbreak in Western Africa is
driving the deployment of U.S. Army resources in a
humanitarian assistance mission aimed at containing
the spread of the disease.
To more effectively counter these evolving threats,
U.S. intelligence agencies must improve collaboration
among organizations and take maximum advantage of
developing technologies. This powerful combination
can break down the traditional intelligence collection
“stovepipes” to allow an open flow of ideas and
complementary capabilities that will inspire new levels
of collaboration and innovation. By accelerating the
innovative process, we can arrive more quickly at
better solutions to difficult problems.
Those who work within the IC’s geospatial community
have long known imagery and maps support a
common framework for a broader level of collaboration.
Geospatial intelligence serves as a canvas and unifying
element to bind the range of organizations and collection
mechanisms. We understand the GEOINT discipline will
not achieve its potential without better incorporating
how our mission partners use geospatially-enabled
data generated by those systems. Rigorous attention
to open geospatial standards and formats also will
expand the utility of geospatial elements. The National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s (NGA) initiative to
provide GEOINT via a “self-service” model in addition
to finished GEOINT products allows for creative use of
geospatial information in ways that effectively support
rapidly changing mission requirements.
Budget Cuts are a Key Driver
Budget pressures will continue for the foreseeable
future even though mission demands may increase. An
impartial survey across key IC organizations leaves no
doubt that some redundancies exist in direct mission
and support functions. To ensure the shrinking pool of
resources is best spent, we support taking a hard scrub
of organizational structures to minimize functional
duplication. The choices that affect one agency may
help the broader IC to become more effective and
efficient. These tradeoffs are already occurring with the
transition to the Intelligence Community Information
Technology Enterprise (IC ITE).
Technology Makes this Transition
a Reality
The IC’s technology backbone has evolved to a level
that is breaking down barriers and supporting greater
collaboration than ever before. IC ITE is a key example.
In 2012, the IC Chief Information Officer embarked
on the largest IT transformation in community history.
Guided by the IC ITE Strategy, the initiative focuses
on enabling greater integration, information sharing,
and information safeguarding through a common IC
IT approach that substantially reduces costs. IC ITE
seeks to provide improved integration, information
sharing, and security through the use of a cloud-based
architecture.
Of IC ITE’s five key goals, two directly address the
dismantling of stovepipes.
• The first goal, “Fortify the Foundation,” defines,
implements, and sustains a single, standards-based,
interoperable enterprise architecture and survivable
infrastructure to accomplish mission objectives
and drive efficiencies across the enterprise and all
security domains. Elements built on this foundation
can further improve IC cross-fertilization and
integration.
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• The second goal, “Forge Strategic Partnerships,”
is aimed at developing and enhancing the trusted
partnerships within the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence (ODNI), IC agencies, other
U.S. government and allied partners, and industry
by leveraging innovative capabilities to enhance
and integrate the intelligence mission. One of the
main ways this is accomplished is by assigning
responsibilities across IC agencies: NGA and
the Defense Intelligence Agency are service
providers for IC ITE’s desktop and enterprise
management while the Central Intelligence Agency
and the National Security Agency are responsible
for portions of the cloud and identification,
authorization, and authentication services. The
National Reconnaissance Office is the initiative’s
networks requirements and engineering service
provider, and ODNI will manage a security
coordination center.
The IC ITE initiative has established an IT backbone
that supports the dismant l ing of intel l igence
stovepipes, but roadblocks to collaboration remain.
The boom in “apps” development has proliferated
dozens of applications that operate independently
of one another and maintain their own isolated data
stores. An approach focused on open services or other
modular components that allow end users to combine
and create their own versions of applications would
improve the information sharing and collaboration.
The 21st Century Workforce
Demands Change
New IC employees come equipped for a “non-silo”
environment and assume open collaboration occurs
naturally. These individuals enter the government
workforce from an agile and freeform environment—
what those in the IC think of as the “outside
world.” Their personal experience and educational
environment lead them to expect instant access to
friends and information via social media and other
online channels they adeptly traverse by posting,
sharing, collaborating, and innovating.
These newcomers are essentially adept at all-source
intelligence; it has been part of their upbringing. The
human brain synthesizes information through sights,
sounds, and other cues, then performs background
processing to fuse these various sensations into insight.
Critical thinking skills today demand multi-disciplinary
approaches, but enforcement of strict organizational
boundaries impedes good thinking, sequesters
information, and stalls creativity. Most analysts enter
their first jobs with aspirations of doing great things and
making a difference, but the weight of years of cultural
and organizational bias can smother that drive. Many
seasoned veterans of the government and contractor
workforce may be able to relate to this. Finishing up
a long and arduous college degree program can be a
rewarding and exhilarating experience. Graduates are
ready to enter the workforce with vim and vigor, eager
to apply their newly gained knowledge and experience
in the real-world environment of their chosen career.
Government and industry must work together to
establish a new cultural infrastructure and keep that
drive alive to maximize the contributions these new
professionals offer.
The transformation in GEOINT tradecraft development
and certification must focus on developing cross-
disciplinary critical thinking skills that create a cross-
IC mindset, instill intellectual rigor, and encourage
imagination. Members of our workforce need to have
a broader context for their work that will enable them
to see themselves first and foremost as IC assets in
service of our nation and secondly as members of a
specific agency or organization.
Building a true cross-IC mindset independent of
traditional stovepipes requires us to examine carefully
the types of partnerships developed across intelligence
agencies. Each is unique in its mission and information
holdings, but constrained resources and technical
interoperability should encourage us to look across
organizational boundaries for solutions that will
provide the greatest benefit to the IC and the taxpayer.
Our partnerships must become more flexible and
extensible; we need to become comfortable with task
forces and working groups that are less static and more
dynamic in terms of mission and membership.
Conclusion
Twenty-first century global threats, workforce
demographics, and technology advancements
are forcing changes in the government-based
organizational and cultural fabric of the U.S. Intelligence
Community that will ultimately improve collaboration
and accelerate innovation among agencies, collection
capabilities, and industry. By adopting open computing
environments, incorporating IC ITE protocols, and
tailoring the work environment to meet the needs and
expectations of newly minted GEOINT analysts, the
dismantling of stovepipes can be a reality and these
goals can be achieved.
USGIF’s Universal GEOINT Credential Transparent. Transportable. Trans-Industry.
USGIF is strengthening the GEOINT profession through the creation
of a new geospatial certification and credentialing program. This
in-depth credential requires knowledge of remote sensing and
imagery analysis, GIS, data management, and synthesis/reporting.
Achieving USGIF’s Universal GEOINT Credential will allow
geospatial professionals to distinguish themselves as
internationally recognized practitioners.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Please contact Ayana Nickerson
USGIF Credentialing Manager
Get Involved With These
Upcoming Activities
April
USGIF Credentialing Steering
Committee
June
Universal GEOINT Certification
Beta Exam
Fall 2015
2nd Annual State of GEOINT
Credentialing Meeting
Learn More at USGIF.org/Education
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What’s on the Horizon
The Clouds and Crowds in Our Future Looking out three to five years, the GEOINT horizon
is filled with crowds and clouds. The need to solve
global issues will give rise to the “crowds,” which we
define for the purposes of this paper as groups of
self-organizing citizen analysts enabled by the clouds.
The “clouds” are the embodiment of advances in
Information Technology (IT), changes in access to
education, and the increase in availability of high-
quality, free, and open-source software. Fueled by
their desire to address global issues, passionate and
self-organizing groups will form to create solutions to
our planet’s geopolitical problems. Ubiquitous access
to advanced computing power, the continued rise
and adoption of open-source software, and the ever-
expanding availability of global higher education will
create a worldwide coalition of people more agile than
governments and just as technically capable. These
crowds will not be performing menial tasks; rather these
are people in the future who will contribute meaningful
analysis toward solving large global problems. The
crowds are also not so literal. Crowds represent the
unification of people behind a common goal—people
who are geographically, socially, and culturally diverse
coming together to battle a global problem.
The not-so-distant future will present world issues
crossing more than just physical borders. Today’s
geographically local problems will not necessarily
be so in the future. Geographically diverse groups of
people, our crowds, will self-organize around issues
and morph into effects-causing groups capable of
not only identifying, but also creating change. These
crowds may garner notoriety and gain backing in the
form of donors and tastemakers throwing financial and
political weight behind their interest areas. We will see
their efforts become just as, if not more, effective than
entire government organizations. Furthermore, these
crowds will be highly effective even in the absence
of the exquisite data and computational power
government entities possess.
The need for good geospatial intelligence (GEOINT),
not blind mapmaking, will be paramount. Educated
crowds capable of helping others navigate the
increasingly complex geopolitical landscape of the
future will be of key value. Crowds will have the ability
to form and move fast, gain support, and then pivot
quicker than any traditional organization.
There will be no shortage of problems in our world
future, but change agents will arise based on the
ability of average citizens to bring about solutions.
No longer will people solely rely on the government
or organization of states. Unifying issues that have
common global impact, such as water scarcity and
natural resource depletion, will spur crowds of non-
state actors into action.
Water supplies in one region can affect hunger
in entire countries and security across an entire
continent. Interconnectivity is not just a digital or
technological concept. The people of this planet are
more interconnected than ever before. With global
sourcing of almost every commodity, people will
become motivated by the widespread influence of
seemingly local issues played out on the other side of
the world. It will be these transcendent issues that unite
us, our education that guides us, and the evolution of
technology that fuels us.
In order to tackle future big-ticket issues and for
crowds to form, citizen-analyst groups will need
to organize, communicate and, most importantly,
perform. By virtue of the ongoing IT cloud revolution,
we have on-demand, cost effective computing power,
ubiquity of data, and availability of advanced open
software. Data availability, data storage, and current
transfer speeds put unprecedented compute power in
the hands of the average person. Globally, people will
be able to collectively wield the same power as a nation
state in terms of information and intelligence creation.
This ever-evolving compute power eases many
concerns about Big Data. It is often forgotten that
storage, compute, and transfer abilities have all kept
pace with the size of data at any given point in time
and are likely to do so into the future. The ability exists
to store vast quantities of data, process them in an
efficient manner, recall them when necessary, and move
them quickly from place to place. With decreasing cost
and increasing simplicity, capacity, and performance,
small communities of citizen-analysts can form into
crowds and, in aggregate, amass technical capabilities
on par with large-scale organizations. Further, with no
hindrance from corporate security or company policies,
| 2015 STATE OF GEOINT REPORT16
crowds are only bound by law and their own morality.
Such crowds can be more agile, respond to change,
and even form, grow, split, or disband as needed.
While the information super highway has widened
to make possible this envisioned future, the means
of traversing this highway is still coming of age.
Software companies and government organizations
are increasingly moving to open-source their software,
making available to anyone Big Data databases,
full-featured Geospatial Information Systems (GIS)
software, advanced analysis capabil it ies, and
visualization suites. Further, the free and open-source
(FOSS) community has proven it can contribute to a
common baseline and drive innovation and change
further and faster than private entities with closed-
source software. These same companies have also
realized they are not losing money by open sourcing
their software. What the GEOINT Community has
learned is that a hammer by itself cannot build a
house—the value is not in the software, it is in the
people using the software. In order to keep pace with
future issues that will face our global population, the
open-source community provides a greater potential to
invent and innovate. It will be these innovations that will
continue to fuel future GEOINT analysts.
Mercator, Latitude, Longitude, geofence, buffer,
shapefile—these are words which used to alienate
most people and were reserved for only the geogeek.
Now, these words are no longer foreign concepts
and do not scare people away. Access to geospatial
education has increased tremendously over the past
decade. Currently, without leaving your home, students
can take courses at leading institutions all over the
world. Students are in virtual classes with highly
diverse groups of classmates. This helps to create and
grow communities centered on areas of interest. This
globalized education is the seed for the rise of small
citizen-analyst cells to self-organize into crowds and
realize change. Outside of the classroom, average
people are honing their skills using map applications
in most aspects of daily life. And, at the same time, we
are realizing a steady increase in the quality of citizen
imagery analysis due to the continued advent of free
geospatial data. Further, with mobile devices and GPS,
the applications of these technologies are becoming
embedded in our DNA, enhancing our means to
understand and apply these ideas to a wide spectrum
of GEOINT challenges.
In order for future citizens to be better civil servants,
a resurgence in geography as a discipline is needed
at the grade school level within the United States.
Map creation, understanding, and global geography
are undervalued skills. Without proper investment,
the young people of today will not have the necessary
foundation to build upon. This strong educational
foundation is paramount to the success of our future.
Knowledge is power, and in our future this will be clear.
The ideas this paper describes depend on a passionate
and educated people—the crowds motivated by future
state world events. The enablers, clouds of education
and technology, are already present in our lives today
and with continued advancement in technology will
only further the enablement of the world citizens.
But, what remains to be seen is twofold: whether the
geopolitical atmosphere allows global issues to be
solved by non-state actors such as our citizen-analyst
crowds; and whether these crowds can organize to
move swiftly enough to stave off future disasters and
lead us to promising solutions.
The Visualization Imperative: Transformation in
Conveying GEOINT Content On Oct. 3, 2014, NGA Director Robert Cardillo issued
his intent for the future of NGA. “Consequence
for our customers is the ultimate objective of our
efforts,” Cardillo stated, and elaborated that delivering
consequence encompassed bringing valued content
that conveyed relevant, timely information in a way
that deepened contextual understanding of NGA
customer missions, intelligence needs, and decisions.
For Cardillo, the “4Cs” that will drive his tenure as the
GEOINT functional manager are related in a simple
formulae: “consequence = conveyance + content +
context.” This contribution to the USGIF “State of
GEOINT” report addresses the conveyance component
of Cardillo’s strategic intent.
In this article, conveyance is addressed by exploring
the state of visualization and visual analytics. There
are many components to conveyance, including how
information is provided, the timeliness of information,
the formatting of the information and its metadata
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that enables it be integrated with other information
and discovered through search engines and the
mix of graphics, text, video, and other multimedia
that calibrates the complexity of the content being
conveyed to the optimal or most effective means
through which customers ingest, understand, and
utilize information.
In many GEOINT strategies and transformation
documents the future of conveyance has been hijacked
by large enterprise initiatives, transformation to IC
ITE, and how content is discovered, accessed, and
transferred through websites. But these are primarily
the logistics and mechanics of conveyance. They are
important, but they are arguably not the essence of
conveyance in the Cardillo 4C formulae.
NGA’s “Defining the Analysis and Technology Vision
for 2020” document, for example, outlines four
categories of technologies for agency investments in
the future of analysis: research and discover; access
and visualize; exploit and analyze; and expose and
report. Interestingly, the only category explicitly
defined by visualization involves how users visualize
data in the process antecedent to exploitation and
analysis. But elsewhere in the vision for technology
the criticality of visualization technology is evident.
At every stage in the process, the future of GEOINT
hinges on the capacity to leverage the human visual
system, which drives analytic reasoning, learning, and
decision-making. There can be no generational leaps
in GEOINT analysts’ capacity for conveyance without
investments in visualization technology. We need more
than immersive visualization at the analyst’s desk. We
need immersive visualization throughout the GEOINT
food chain, from requirements generation to collection
all the way to the customer.
The GEOINT Community needs to rethink where
conveyance fits in Cardillo’s 4C formulae. In the past,
conveyance has been a secondary consideration
in the analytic food chain that derives intelligence
value from GEOINT data. The priority has traditionally
been on content, mostly in the form of data and the
analytic judgments brought to bear on intelligence
issues or military operations. It is no longer the case,
however, that content reigns supreme. For many, the
most important contribution that content makes to
consequence is expertise and intimacy with customer
missions and needs. In this sense, content is about
judgment, insight, and human cognition. These are
indeed the most important factors in the future of
GEOINT. Until recently, the essence of content has
been tied to data and collection. Content has been
about the “secrets” adversaries wish to deny us
that collection sources provide. However, insight on
the most important and pressing national security
issues now require more sophisticated, dynamic, and
interactive visualization capabilities.
Conveyance is no longer a matter of deciding at the
end of the analysis and production process how to
annotate textual reports, add graphics, or embed
tables or simple visualizations into a report before it
is published. The visualization component, especially
analytic visualization, must be considered as part of
the overall design and management of all analytic
missions. Content and conveyance overlap. In some
mission areas they are inseparable. Context, another
of the 4Cs, is also becoming part of conveyance. The
essence of context is locating GEOINT content that
supports mission context, the decision space, or the
decision process as a multi-dimensional, integrated,
and adaptive resource. To consider content and
context as components of consequence requires
analytic visualization.
National security decision-making is largely a realm of
vision and foresight—of seeing realities unfold across
time and through space and steering the ship of state
away from the shoals. This requires spatial referencing
data, information, and knowledge, as well as technical
capabilities and analytical services to enhance and
extend innate visualization faculties. Spatially and
temporally, the boundaries and conceptualization of
national security have shifted over the last two decades
into a more dynamic, asymmetric, and unpredictable
threat landscape that stresses traditional organizational
constructs for analyzing, understanding, and
addressing security challenges. In the past, security
challenges have been spatially organized using political
or human geographic methods rich in thematic layers
which, when combined, provide context about threats
and support policy development and operations.
Traditionally this has meant the military or geopolitical
delineation of front vs. rear, forward vs. reach-back
operations, and foreign vs. domestic jurisdictional
boundaries. On a much different level, however, it is the
combination of both spatial awareness and augmented
visual thinking capabilities that holds the greatest
promise for enhancing the strategic effectiveness of
U.S. intelligence.
Why visual thinking? Throughout history, the spatial
and visual components of strategic planning, including
spatial awareness, visual thinking, imagination, and the
spatial-visual dimensions of the sub-conscious mind
have been the cornerstones of political and military
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success, primarily because they are the foundation
for decision-making, organizing and coordinating
behavior, and imagining alternative courses of action.
Visualization is much more than a by-product of optical
nerve activity; it is the sine qua non of imagination,
foresight, creative thought, pattern matching, intuition,
diagnostics, simulation, analysis, and cognitive
processes central to intelligence analysis and the
emergence of “wisdom” from corporate knowledge
management activities. Cognitively, the visual pathway
associated with the cerebral and visual cortices is the
seat of mental prowess, the brain’s high bandwidth
process for integrating all sources of sensory
information, memory, and imagination. Since the days
of Ptolemy, moreover, the synergistic effects of spatial
awareness and visual thinking have formed the core
of the “mind’s eye” for correlating disparate pieces of
information to simulate present and future realities. It is
this combination that gives rise to predictive analysis—
the ability to anticipate behavior and make proactive
decisions.
Problem solving, creativity, and thinking through
different courses of action arise from cognitive
subsystems that tap into spatial reasoning and the
mental mapping facilitated through the visual cortex.
This is a constitutively multi-spectral and all-source
process, which results in a layered visualization
capability that can fold space and time in any
direction to facilitate reasoning, critical analysis, and
the connection or correlation of fragments—real
or imagined—to find hidden patterns or expose
connections that do not yet exist. Einstein exemplified
this ability when he imagined himself in a box traveling
by the Earth at the speed of light, a visual journey that
shattered existing concepts of physics and collapsed
space and time inward.
It is time to rethink our conceptualization of, and
approach to, the emerging visualization imperative.
For the Intell igence Community, implementing
reform requires a more self-conscious understanding
of spatial and temporal aspects of visualization.
Investments in enterprise-level search and discovery
capabilities, cloud-based knowledge management
programs, and new content management services
must be matched with similar investments in training,
analytic visualization tools, and the understanding
of customer requirements. The GEOINT Community
discusses visualization and situational awareness too
narrowly, tending to think of visualization only in terms
of imagery, remote sensing, information displays, and
operational pictures.
Indeed, increased information gathering, sharing, and
correlating capabilities along with growing experience
in virtual communities have defined new organizational
expectations for data and information visualization.
Visualization facilitates alternative approaches to
problem solving by allowing cognitive “simulation”
and rehearsal, which provides for internal “gaming” of
solutions and the development of creative, successful
outcomes. In the case of insight into the present
and foresight into the future, visualizing actions and
decisions is a crucial, necessary step in affecting the
unfolding of history.
Like Napoleon, Clausewitz considered the visualization
of forces moving through both time and space as
critical for success. To master space, according to
Clausewitz, a special gift is needed: the ability to
quickly and accurately grasp the topography of any
area. This special ability was “imagination,” which in
today’s parlance would have to be defined using such
terms as terrain visualization, spatial awareness, battle
space visualization, foresight, and others. Seeing,
understanding, and extrapolating from spatial and
temporal awareness constituted the essence of military
genius, which for Clausewitz was the conjoining of
innate and learned faculties to overcome or moderate
the friction and fog of war. The fundamental goal was
achieving superior thought, decisions, and actions
while under great stress and when facing mounting
uncertainty about the future.
Drawing on advances in cognitive neuroscience and
brain imaging techniques, we know that cognitive
imagery processes, including spatial referencing
and information visualization, are central to problem
solving and other higher brain functions. The message
for GEOINT transformation, based on new insights
into the role of cognitive visual and spatial faculties,
is straightforward: as a species we are spatially
oriented problem-solvers who generally rely on visual
cognitive capabilities to make sense of the world
and integrate sensory input and memory. The current
“state of GEOINT” receives at best a mixed report
card regarding visualization. Investment is spotty.
Experimentation portfolios are lackluster. Integrating
advances from open-source media, where complex
analytic visualization and graphics are central to the
vitality of both print and online publishing, is virtually
nonexistent.
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The task ahead of us is overcoming organizational
barriers to fully leveraging visual thinking, barriers that
prevent the full analytic capabilities—or the inherent
human potential of analyst collaboration—from being
fully utilized in policy-making and for decision support
during crises. There are a number of areas the GEOINT
Community should focus on to leverage the explosion
in analytic visualization driven by innovation across
the data science, gaming, cognitive imaging, social
neuroscience, workforce career paths, graph theory,
experiential learning, and user experiences.
The GEOINT analysis and production community
must develop a more comprehensive program to both
derive meaning from ingested data and analytics and
to enable customers to dynamically interact with their
reporting. Research indicates decision-makers do not
want to be locked into one visualization application
or tool. Instead, they want to be linked to dynamic
content in which hybrid visualizations are possible
with text, images, and more pedestrian visualization
from spreadsheets and pivot tables combined with
advanced visualization tools. They want to be able to
explore data.
Analysts should have analytic visualization tools that
enable automated taxonomies and augment mapping
to facilitate search, network analysis, and collection
strategies that are discoverable by customers. These
capabilities need to be tied across temporal reporting so
customers can experience learning over time and require
collaborative visualization using multiple perspectives.
Analysts and their customers must compare, contrast,
and challenge how information is viewed.
The GEOINT Community also needs to integrate
development programs and transformation agendas
to assure seamlessness across discovery and
reporting visualization, visual analytics that facilitate
or complement critical thinking/analytic methods,
and any initiatives to convey complex information
to customers. This requires dynamic visualization,
automatic hypothesis testing, and automatic updating
of divergent visualizations with version mapping, the
latter being a capability IC ITE directly addresses
through metadata tagging and tracking of different user
experiences. One benefit of this for the conveyance
objective is embedded visualizations that automatically
render from available data and that update dynamically
over time. Another benefit of advanced conveyance
technology is visualization capabilities that allow
freeform annotat ions throughout the GEOINT
Community.
In conclusion, it is time to rethink our concept of, and
approach to, the emerging visualization imperative.
For the Intelligence Community, implementing reform
requires a more self-conscious understanding of
spatial and temporal aspects of visualization that
continue to influence modern intellectual life and
underwrite the processes of decision-making. Current
investments in enterprise-level search and discovery
capabilities, cloud-based knowledge management
programs, and new content management services
must be matched with similar investments in training,
analytic visualization tools, and customer experiences
that enable hybrid visualization services for customers
to embed interactive conveyance services into their
decision-making processes.
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Human-centric Data Immersion Today, we have the luxury of being ensconced in data.
Data is everywhere and it engulfs us. It’s geotagged so
it can be mapped, and the visualization possibilities
are prolific. It can be used in vulnerability and risk
assessment, human crises, and is available to prevent,
protect, and care for human security. Data might
be classified or open-source, crowdsourced, social
media sourced, in real time (UAVs, full-motion videos),
archived, historic, even non-intuitive. There are new
analysis techniques for Big Data extraction and the
quick delivery of actionable knowledge. Data provides
the means to answer the questions of what, when, how,
where, and why—all key factors needed to identify,
prepare, prevent, protect, respond, and recover from
events. High levels of abstraction exist.
And as the day of the autonomous car approaches, so
do other opportunities. For example, as we hear about
the spreading of the Ebola virus and the Enterovirus,
the question arises about what we can do to provide aid
or prevent additional outbreaks. Obvious and essential
GEOINT requirements exist for outbreak mapping
centers, as well as for identifying where and how best
to send relief and educate individuals in precautionary
measures. Yet, within this data ubiquity how can
and should social responsibility be considered? This
was alluded to when the Dallas county prosecutor
considered pressing criminal charges against the now
deceased Thomas Eric Duncan in consideration of
whether he intentionally and knowingly exposed the
public to the Ebola virus. The question we might ask is
whether geodata could be used to prevent the spread
of contagious diseases by identifying key signs in
infected individuals and enforcing containment?
Technically it could. Take Fitbit, for example. These
wearable devices track daily activity, calories burned,
sleep patterns, and weight, then upload the information
wirelessly so progress can be tracked on mobile and
online dashboards. Already seen in bracelet form,
it is feasible such tracking could be embedded in
watches and wedding rings. The opportunity is there
to give away or even sell an individual’s spatial health
information. The idea in itself is radical and flips the
GEOINT coin. A conceptually noble undertaking might
be for authorities to use this information to prevent the
spread of disease, yet the human repercussions of
such implementation could be massive.
One side of the coin exposes an obvious pursuit to
safeguard the human condition, and the other to retain
human privacy, even dignity. Both sides could be
inspired and reactive, both defensive and intelligent.
Those wrongly implicated might expect, even demand,
such information be commonly available and released
to set the record straight, while others might shrink
away from the invasion of privacy. Others will suggest it
has utility to address bioterrorism, others simply won’t
care. Some might insist it be implemented for all airline
passengers, at least those traveling from countries
affected by a disease such as Ebola. Irrespectively,
all human vantage points and perceptions should
be recognized, not excluding the momentum lent to
practices of denial and deception, geospoofing, bad
reporting, and disconnectivity. Such covert operations
merit further discussion.
While there will be great advantages to broadening
geolocation services, there will undoubtedly be those
who do not want to be part of human-centric GEOINT.
When everyone is connected, conspicuous holes in the
data may draw more attention than the elements that
fit in.
The next intelligence “arms race” may be development
of tools to create a credible geospoofed record for
consumption by the various engines that track a
digital life. The deceptive information provided by
the geospoofer needs to be sophisticated enough
to respond to his or her purported environment. For
instance, a track that is supposed to be of a person
in a car needs to show response to traffic accidents
and slowdowns, events that both the spoofer and law
enforcement (or commercial data consumer) might not
know about in real time. To counter geospoofing, law
enforcement will need to identify reoccurring sameness
in space patterns as a potential “replay” of previous
normal day tracks.
Thus, the complexity of the human response system
and the GEOINT process is mutually inclusive. The time
is dawning, therefore, to move toward human-centric
GEOINT.
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Data Privacy and Security
Emerging Boundaries and
Restrictions
As we consider what’s on the horizon, the frequent
temptation is to scope the proverbial “art of the
possible” rather than focus on potential impediments
to fully realizing the potential of existing GEOINT
sources and methods. Unfortunately, several topics
currently swirling within the Intelligence Community
may greatly impact our ability to effectively utilize
capabilities and sources that demonstrate great
potential. In particular, issues associated with data
privacy and security will merit increasing attention if we
are to realize the exciting futures that are emerging, and
even those yet to be discovered. Specific challenges
include restrictions and constraints regarding the
use of location data and related analytic capabilities,
as well as the unauthorized use of, access to, or
adversary exploitation of these same resources. These
challenges may significantly limit, or even preclude our
ability to use important sources and methods, and also
negatively influence the public perception of our work.
They may even limit our ability to effectively recruit and
retain talent.
With these data privacy and security challenges in mind,
several questions emerge that should be considered by
the community as we work to not only fulfill our primary
mission, but also to protect and preserve the great
benefits GEOINT sources and methods provide. Ideally,
we will be proactive in solution-focused discussion of
these hard problems because if history provides any
clues, poorly timed and/or reactive responses are not
likely to generate workable answers.
Unauthorized Access/Use,
Adversary Exploitation
Location not only adds value but it inherently increases
the potential sensitivity of the data. Therefore, just as
GEOINT can support meaningful insight, anticipation,
and influence, it would be naïve to believe we are the
only ones with the foresight and ability to effectively
exploit such information. Access to and use of GEOINT
sources and methods by our adversaries creates a
new dimension in risk and threat assessment. At a
minimum, the increasing frequency of data breaches
represents an inconvenience to consumers as
credit cards and passwords need to be updated,
and fraudulent transactions resolved. Perhaps more
troubling, however, would be the ability to effectively
exploit stolen GEOINT content in support of truly
informed and specifically targeted attacks. Again,
geolocation concurrently adds value to and increases
the sensitivity of associated data—something the crisis
and conflict mapping community is acutely aware of
and actively works to address and mitigate in an effort
to ensure they do no harm to the communities they
serve. Similarly, the routine collection of geoenabled
data and increased ability to create truly prescient
derived products in support of meaningful and
actionable pattern of life analysis represents an entirely
new domain of risk and threat that will complicate
decisions regarding the collection and use of GEOINT.
Privacy, U.S. Persons, and
Personally Identifiable Information
Perhaps the most pressing question facing our
community is how the expectation of privacy aligns
with GEOINT. Privacy and the protection of civil rights
and liberties is not a new issue for our community,
particularly as it relates to U.S. persons and personally
identifiable information (PII). Recent public debate,
however, has identified GEOINT as a potentially
intrusive data source that merits review and scrutiny.
Adding to the controversy is the increasing use of
transactional data and other sources to infer location
and/or identity, even when the individual has explicitly
opted out. For example, recent reports suggest the
social media app Whisper can use a smartphone ID
and IP address to infer location, while also being able
to use this and related content to derive a unique
identifier, if not actual PII. Similarly, IBM Watson has
been able to effectively leverage high-performance
computing, natural language processing of social
media feeds, and geoenabled financial transaction
data to infer links between social media accounts and
specific customers in support of pattern of life analysis
and related targeted marketing.
While these sources and methods are currently
confined to commercial uses, and the requirements and
constraints are relatively clear and fixed as they relate
to U.S. government collection and use of GEOINT,
the potential for misuse is readily apparent. To date,
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the commercial segment has operated in this space
relatively unfettered and people have demonstrated an
intriguingly transactional approach to their PII, willingly
sharing private data including location in exchange for
a real or perceived benefit. Whether it is a location-
specific coupon, discount, or some other relevant offer
or suggestion, individuals are willing to share their
information in exchange for a personal benefit.
Our community needs only to look at the data science
domain to see a glimpse of our future. From the Data
Mining Moratorium Act of 2003, which stated: “[t]here
are significant concerns regarding the extent to which
privacy rights of individuals would be adversely affected
by data mining carried out by their government,” to the
European Union’s “right to be forgotten,” government
collection and use of data and the associated analytics
have increasingly been contested and curtailed. In
a move reminiscent of the Data Mining Moratorium
Act, legislation proposing “guidelines” for the use of
geolocation data is being considered currently by
the U.S. Congress. The commercial sector has not
been immune to questions regarding data privacy,
and missteps such as the Target “pregnancy model”
underscore the potential for backlash if the public
believes their trust has been misplaced or abused,
even if only inadvertently. We would be smart to learn
by example from these lessons.
Sensors, Automated Collection,
and Unreasonable Search
Closely following questions regarding the expectation
of privacy are concerns regarding the use of sensors or
other methods of automated collection and associated
prohibitions against unreasonable search (i.e. Fourth
Amendment). While the use of sensors and automated
collection methods appear to represent a logical
extension of manual approaches, public perception
seems to suggest there is a very important distinction,
particularly as applied to government collection and
use. For example, while there is no obvious expectation
of privacy regarding your location in a public place,
the use of geo-enabled apps, automated license plate
readers, toll collection, or other automated methods
has resulted in heated public debate and legislative
action, including provisions requiring warrants for the
“digital tracking of location.”
With the public conversely demonstrating remarkable
tolerance for the use of automated collection
capabilities for tangible benefit, the result is a relatively
opaque space where the lines of acceptable collection
and use appear to be exceptionally fluid with regard
to collector, source, and perceived benefits to the end
user. Unfortunately, the application of 18th century
legal concepts to 21st century technology will continue
to create legal questions with no easy or readily
identifiable answers or solutions, and at least some
of the remedies being discussed may severely limit or
otherwise curtail the collection and use of GEOINT in
support of public safety and national security missions.
Public Perception of GEOINT
As we contemplate the many and diverse challenges
associated with acceptable collection and use of
GEOINT, it will be important to step back and also
consider public perceptions of these activities,
particularly in support of public safety or national
security missions. For many, perception is reality.
Therefore, while the GEOINT Community is frequently
constrained by a need to protect sources and methods,
Hollywood has been particularly adept at framing the
narrative in a manner that portrays the government
as extraordinarily intrusive and manipulative. The
collection capabilities and use of advanced analytics
to inappropriately monitor and target citizens has been
portrayed in popular culture for decades in a manner
that nurtures distrust. Unfortunately, the information
leaked by Edward Snowden merely represents
“confirmatory evidence” for what many already “knew”
or at least suspected.
More broadly, will these perceptions of the government
use of GEOINT, whether realistic, influence whether
people are willing to support the community? Is a
transactional approach similar to that adopted by the
commercial segment practical or even appropriate?
Experience from the Sochi Olympics suggests
both spectators and athletes were willing to accept
extensive surveillance and monitoring in support of a
safe experience. Would this exchange of privacy for
security translate to other locations and venues, and
for how long? Perhaps more important, though, is
whether increased surveillance and monitoring is in
keeping with our understanding of a free society and
the role government should play in collection and use,
and who should ultimately make these choices?
As we consider the potential consequences associated
with a diminished public perception of the collection
and use of GEOINT, will increased transparency help
or hinder the community, particularly when it comes
to sensitive sources and methods? Perceptions of
inappropriate collection, access, and use have been
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associated historically with reactive attempts to
regulate and the introduction of other legal constraints.
The current consideration of legislation to control or
otherwise limit the collection and use of GEOINT is
something we should note and consider carefully.
Again, these are really hard questions without easy
or obvious answers, but it behooves us to at least
consider these issues so we will be able to respond
with truly informed input.
Recruiting and Retention
Finally, of direct concern to the future of our community
is whether these challenges will influence our ability
to recruit and retain the best and brightest analysts
and technical experts. For many, the opportunity to
support the U.S. national security mission offers the
unique opportunity to change outcomes and truly
make a difference on a daily basis through service
that frequently is unheralded and anonymous. Will this
commitment to mission be sufficient going forward to
overcome potential barriers created by the perception
that government is intrusive in its collection and use of
GEOINT? On the other hand, will our mission become
so constrained that the most attractive environment
for doing truly innovative GEOINT work becomes
the commercial setting? Even today, the commercial
sector frequently offers highly competitive salaries and
benefits. Will the opportunity to do more interesting
work with a greater breadth and depth of content and
related capabilities in the commercial environment
divert the most highly qualified applicants away from
national security? The importance of recruiting and
retaining the best and brightest to ensure continuity
and excellence in the workforce will require that we
not only consider these challenges, but also make sure
they are effectively addressed.
Conclusion
The future of GEOINT is exciting and promising. Novel
sources and methods for meaningful analysis are
emerging daily, and solutions to some of our hardest
problems appear to be just on the horizon. With great
power, though, comes great responsibility. Considering
some of the potential challenges facing our community,
particularly as related to the privacy and security of
GEOINT data and capabilities, it is important that we
begin asking the hard questions of ourselves about
who should have access to what data, when, how it
will be protected, and how it will be used. There are
no easy answers or solutions. However, it is imperative
that we as a community start at least considering data
privacy and security to ensure access to important
GEOINT sources and methods now and in the future.
The Transition of GEOINT to a Market-Directed
Model—Crisis or Opportunity? “How did it get so late so soon?” - Dr. Seuss
Until the 21st century, the U.S. government drove
innovation by its large yearly investments in GEOINT
research and development (R&D) and by establishing
classification and export/import barriers to control
access to the data and technology. Commercial
innovation leaders such as Northrop Grumman,
IBM, and Hewlett-Packard were largely directed by
government funded and controlled activities such as
the race to space and the development of advanced
arms needed during the Cold War.
As a result of the explosion of global connectedness
during the last decade, the demand and expectations
for GEOINT data by an increasingly impatient mobile
global citizenry have fueled an explosion in commercial
geospatial innovation.
Is this a crisis or an opportunity for the U.S. government?
Is it too late for the U.S. government (USG) to engage
in meaningful ways to benefit from this commercial
market-driven innovation? More importantly, did the
early export/import control of technology developed
by U.S. firms prevent the global competitive market
interactions by these firms and, instead, erode U.S.
dominance in commercial GEOINT innovation? Has the
continued ITAR restriction relegated U.S. commercial
GEOINT innovation permanently behind European and
Asian nations? Is it too late?
USG and Innovation
Let’s first look at whether the USG can leverage and
benefit from commercial innovations. Innovative
uses of geospatial data to support commercial users
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have driven the creation of markets for geospatial
data that were unforeseen just a few years ago.
The innovative players in the commercial geospatial
industry are developing products at a rapid pace
that outstrips the USG’s ability to acquire and ingest
these new applications and products into the USG
GEOINT enterprise baseline. Commercial technology
has leapfrogged ahead of the defense industry in
almost every important area. As a result, commercial
geospatial capabilities are rapidly diverging from the
USG baseline of just a few years ago.
New players, such as Google and Skybox Imaging
(which is now owned by Google), arrived with new
business models and disruptive technologies. Existing
market players have responded by transforming
their business models away from selling to the USG
and are instead focusing on much larger, more
lucrative commercial GEOINT endeavors. Although
the primary obstacle preventing the USG from
acquiring commercial innovations is indeed its broken
procurement practices, the role of antiquated policies
also has had an effect. USG policy has failed to keep
pace with the rate of daily operational innovations—
innovations that promote a mobile, interconnected
workforce driven by open information sharing. One
could argue that a commercial company selling to the
USG risks becoming obsolete in the global market
if it must conform to USG acquisition and policy
constraints. This strong set of disincentives pushes
away precisely the types of innovation the USG
desperately needs, and the USG GEOINT user base
often has to make do without.
The size of these diversified commercial GEOINT
markets has attracted commercial investment that now
dwarfs the U.S. government’s yearly investments in
GEOINT R&D. Google’s market value is approaching
$400 billion, more than double the combined value
of the top four U.S. defense contractors. The
combined R&D investments of the top five U.S.
defense contractors amount to less than half of the
yearly Microsoft R&D budget. Thus, the government
budget no longer shapes the geospatial and GEOINT
market as it once did. The Department of Defense
procurement process has become more of a barrier to
new entrants in recent years, which often leaves key
geospatial acquisitions to the least-qualified defense
contractors. At a minimum, the procurement process
appears parochial and preferential to companies
already conducting business in the government space.
Declining budgets, an archaic acquisition process,
Byzantine policies, and USG demands that require
companies to turn over intellectual property—even if
developed using private investment—are continuing
barriers to USG influence, ensuring the shape of the
future GEOINT market will be formed primarily by
commercial pressures and interests.
As a result, the USG is missing out on several levels
of the ongoing geospatial revolution. The USG
is struggling to bring existing GEOINT tools and
products developed in the 20th century for 20th
century production workflows, to a wider audience.
At the same time new and innovative commercial,
geospatially-based products are being developed and
deployed by the commercial geospatial industry at a
pace the USG can never hope to match.
Is it too late? Beyond the USG acquisition cycle and
policy challenges, are there other factors impacting
adoption of commercial products and solutions by
the USG? The rapid development and deployment
of innovative commercial geospatial products could
have been (and could still be) a boon to the USG
GEOINT Community. Unfortunately, the USG has
so far proven to be resistant to adopting these
commercial developments. The inability of the USG to
accept commercial GEOINT solutions to government
challenges stems in part from a cultural antipathy to
procuring commercial solutions. This natural antipathy
perhaps stems from a misplaced over-confidence
that “we have better solutions developed behind our
secret door” because the lack of transparency prevents
challenge to such claims. Or is it simply a result of
the USG not knowing how to effectively partner with
commercial business? Federal Acquisition Regulations
have been modified over the past decade to mandate
consideration of commercially available solutions,
but any impartial assessment of recent acquisition
programs will show that commercial solutions are
rarely adopted.
The expanding dichotomy of commercially available
functionality and lack of USG application affects every
aspect of GEOINT. The wide range of geospatially-
enabled and social media commercial capabilities
commonly used on smartphones are generally not
available to a USG GEOINT analyst. The GEOINT tools
and products available to the intelligence analysts are
largely the same as those available to an analyst more
than a decade ago. As an example, the Intelligence
Community continues to rely on a 1970s construct, the
BE number catalog as their main entre to target search
and collection tasking rather than adopting the far more
intuitive and practical latitude/longitude or graphical
zoom-in/zoom-out search applied via commercial
platforms and apps.
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The Global Marketplace: The U.S.
as a Geospatial Innovation Leader
Secondly, let’s explore whether U.S. firms can continue
to drive and lead geospatial innovations in the global
market. Are we losing our position? The world is
developing technology at a rapid rate—as much as
we would like to believe the U.S. has cornered the
market on innovation, we are no longer in a position of
leadership in many relevant areas. We need to be able
to trade ideas and capabilities and to partner with allies
and cooperative parties.
Boundary conditions placed on our technology
development and sharing have become critical
impediments to U.S. participation in the broader
GEOINT world. These conditions include the continued
role of ITAR in limiting international technology
evolution—we are constrained from including many
sensor analytic methods and processes due to their
prior association with weapons development. The rule
that technology first developed for a weapons purpose
will be forever controlled by the ITAR regimen needs
to be re-evaluated. The first digital computers were
developed to solve nuclear weapons calculations and
cryptographic problems, but today their descendants
drive all commercial technology. It is time to constrain
the ITAR limits (if they remain necessary at all) to
technologies with the CORE purpose of weapons
control or development. Only then can the U.S.
maintain a position in the pack of geospatial innovators
and developers.
Some Final Thoughts
“Action expresses priorities.” - Gandhi
The future is full of opportunity and it is not yet too
late for the USG to get in position to take advantage
of commercial GEOINT capabilities and innovative
thinking. Driven by the market, the rate of technology
change and innovation are ever increasing. Leadership
within the Intelligence Community will have to take
forceful action to change the current trajectory
of the acquisition system. Visionary leaders who
understand current realities, working with a plausible
set of assumptions, must develop multiple plans with
alternative future images rather than betting on a single
forecast of the future and rigidly adhering to a single
path forward. The USG acquisition must exhibit more
flexibility, transparency, and openness to innovation
from a much broader spectrum of providers. While
changing the current culture will be challenging and
require the long-term attention of agency leadership,
the payoff will be a dramatic leap forward into 21st
century GEOINT capabilities.
GEOINT at a Crossroads:
A View from the Federal Sector Over the last several years the world of GEOINT has
changed dramatically. There has been widespread
adoption and innovation in geospatial capabilities
across the public and private sectors. Geospatial
capabilities have become ubiquitous in everyday life—
from powering smartphone applications, to buying
a house, to driving cars with GPS. This ubiquity in
geospatial capabilities is challenging many long held
assumptions about how we operate in the national
security, natural resources, disaster response, and
other traditional U.S. federal domains. GEOINT and the
“power of where” have transformed the way we interact
with each other, conduct business, and view the world.
With this shift in the GEOINT universe, with “where” in
everything we do, GEOINT is at a crossroads—how
U.S. federal GEOINT practitioners respond and view
the world must continue to evolve.
The GEOINT roadmap needs to be grounded in the
geospatial art and science from where the discipline
came, while remaining agile enough to embrace
innovation and change. At the heart of GEOINT is
location-enabled information. No longer is GEOINT
simply the making of maps or analyzing of imagery. Nor
is it just the domain of the U.S. federal government.
Because the federal government is no longer the
primary producer of data, it should instead prepare
to take advantage of what is already available from a
blend of public and private sector data holdings. At the
core of this roadmap, GEOINT must change by:
| 2015 STATE OF GEOINT REPORT26
• Drawing on data already available instead of creating it
• Partnering with new entities to find the answers
• Teaming across public and private sectors to
problem solve
• Taking advantage of technology improvements to
share information
• Leveraging new thinking developed through evolving
academic programs and experts
These suggested changes provide an opportunity
to transform U.S. federal operations by leveraging
the power of the GEOINT revolution. Identifying
opportunities for change is one important step.
However, taking advantage of these opportunities
requires a major shift in GEOINT culture—the federal
sector does not have to do everything for itself.
Fundamentally, the GEOINT Community needs to
contemplate some tough questions:
• Should the U.S. government continue to make
maps? Even though there may be a need for very
specialized maps or niche products for unique
applications, how can we better leverage print-
on-demand technology to streamline mapping
requirements?
• Will the U.S. government continue to produce
geospatial data and products, even when these
same data and products are also available through
public domain or commercial means? Can we
shift our GEOINT data provisioning strategy from
collections to acquisition?
• Can the U.S. federal GEOINT enterprise shift to
leveraging other producers for derived products
instead of generating those products on our own?
Can we ask questions of producers and let them
provide the answers?
• Can we let go of costly legacy GEOINT systems and
databases and take advantage of global data and
the cloud?
• What skill sets should we continue to require from
our workforce and should we be acquiring new skill
sets to take advantage of shifts in GEOINT? How do
we continue to evolve GEOINT tradecraft, training,
and education?
The GEOINT Community must consider the following
observations in answering these questions.
The U.S. federal government is no longer the sole driver
of new technology and data creation in the GEOINT
world. The federal government will be a major driver of
standards to ensure, most importantly, that the data be
interoperable, discoverable, and accessible to all.
The explosion of mobile capabilities will drive major
changes in how the federal government applies
GEOINT to conduct missions. The current uneven
deployment of these mobile tools must be addressed
so federal users can optimize use of these capabilities,
particularly to enable teaming across federal, state,
local, international, and business domains. Within
current budget constraints, federal partners must
jointly invest in new technology and training to keep
pace with GEOINT change and avoid becoming
“disadvantaged users.”
We can’t lose the tradecraft—we sti l l need to
understand the science and art behind GEOINT, but the
workforce we hire in the future will need vastly different
skills than what we have today. The workforce living
in a GEOINT-rich world will need data science and
data analytics skills to make sense of vast amounts
of information served up from across the globe. That
workforce will move in and out of the federal sector and
possess credentials that allow them to move into many
GEOINT data fields—they will live within the data—to
answer the questions we face.
Finally, there are several GEOINT policy issues that
must be addressed related to geospatial information
sharing, safeguarding, privacy, and the rights of U.S.
persons. With the ongoing GEOINT revolution, U.S.
decision-makers will face even more complex policy
challenges to keep pace with emerging GEOINT
capabilities and practices that will quickly outpace
existing policies and authorities.
The proliferation of GEOINT capabilities and data is
changing our viewpoint. Geospatial capabilities have
become ubiquitous to our lives. It’s time for the federal
domain to aggressively embrace these shifts to ensure
we can meet our national goals. The focus should be
on maintaining and improving relevance and ensuring
the U.S. federal government can keep pace as the rest
of the GEOINT world moves ahead.
USGIF accreditation of
collegiate geospatial
intelligence certificate
programs supports vital
national security interests
by assuring that students
are prepared for careers
within the growing
GEOINT enterprise.
Earning a geospatial
intelligence certificate
from a USGIF-accredited
institution provides
students with the skills
required to address
challenges, and it
ensures employers are
getting high caliber
potential hires who
understand GEOINT.
Want to develop a geospatial intelligence certificate program at your university?
Visit usgif.org/education/accreditation for more information.
Collegiate Accreditation Program
USGIF is a 501(c)(3) non-lobbying, nonprofit educational foundation dedicated to
promoting the geospatial intelligence tradecraft and developing a stronger community
of interest between Government, Industry, Academia, and Professional Organizations.
240
$792K USGIF in 2014 published the Human Geography
monograph as a community resource.
TEN YEARS Sustaining Member
Organizations
Launched in 2012
as USGIF’s first
official print magazine.
GEOGRAPHY Socio-Cultural Dynamics and Challenges to Global Security
Darryl G. Murdock,
Robert R. Tomes and
Christopher K. Tucker, editors
MONOGR A PH S E R I E SU S G I F V O LUME 1
in Scholarships awarded since 2004
USGIF produces the
GEOINT Symposium,
the largest intelligence
event in the world.
USGIF is developing the first
Universal GEOINT Credentialing
Program to bolster profesional
development in the GEOINT tradecraft.
Twelve Accredited Geospatial
Intelligence Certificate Programs Northeastern
West Point
Penn State
George Mason
USC
Redlands
Air Force Academy
U. of Utah
UM Columbia
Fayetteville State
UT Dallas U. of South Carolina
Did you know USGIF offers hundreds of
hours of training, education, and professional
development opportunities throughout the year?
Almost 500 students
have graduated from
USGIF-accredited
programs with
GEOINT Certificates.
@USGIFypg
The USGIF Young Professionals Group (YPG) serves to unite junior GEOINT
professionals within the Defense and Intelligence communities.
usgif.org/community/YPG
FOR MORE DETAILS Join USGIF’s YPG for monthly events and programs which
provide dynamic learning and networking opportunities.
