1 paper
bball1kao5
w4_lecture_1.docxW4 Lecture 1 "The Landscape of Intelligence"
Criminal Intelligence Analysis
The Landscape of Intelligence
The Intelligence Community
So far we have addressed the “intelligence community” in fairly broad terms, making only passing references to its diverse membership and how they might be understood in relationship to each other. We can generally understand the intelligence community as falling into four separate but sometimes overlapping categories with each category approaching intelligence from a different aspect.
But before we dive too far into that subject, we need to make a distinction between the “intelligence community” and the Intelligence Community (IC). The IC refers to the formal bureaucracy of organizations under the United States government. Thanks to the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004, which defined all intelligence as national intelligence in order to streamline information sharing (Lowenthal, 2012), it can be difficult to sort out what we mean by “criminal intelligence” when we speak of criminal intelligence analysis.
In this lecture we will look at the IC in the broadest sense, interpreting it as involving four key terrrains on which the exercise of intelligence analysis takes place often in striking similar ways: national intelligence, military intelligence, criminal intelligence, and competitive intelligence.
National Intelligence
When we think of the intelligence community, we usually think of it in terms of national intelligence. National intelligence refers to intelligence about national-level requirements affecting the security of the state. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has jurisdiction over national intelligence inside the United States. All counterterrorism missions, regardless of whether they manage threats to federal, state, or local governments, ultimately fall under the FBI’s purview.
The FBI is a component of the Department of Justice, and as such it plays a key role in investigating federal crimes, as well. A close partner to the FBI is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), although the DHS also have key disaster management responsibilities.
The primary proponent of national intelligence in the United States is the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), which was established under IRTPA to coordinate intelligence activities across the various agencies that service the goals of foreign policy and national security.
If the job of the DNI strikes you as being redundant to the job of the DCI, then you would be partially correct. Following investigations into the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was clear someone in the intelligence community would have to suffer the consequences for not forewarning the nation against yet another national security surprise.
As the head of the agency establish explicitly to prevent that very thing from occurring, the DCI was essentially decapitated in favor of the DNI, a reasonably sensitive subject for the CIA. Beyond the CIA and the FBI, the national intelligence community encompasses a wide berth of agencies, each with its particular mandate, but all oriented at the national level, usually in direct service to federal policymakers.
The most famous agency within national intelligence is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), although its mandate it restricted to operations occurring outside the United States. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States established the Organization of Strategic Intelligence as an attempt to ensure we were never again caught unaware of imminent threats to national security.
After World War II, a debate arose as to whether or not we needed to maintain a robust national intelligence organization. Each department at the time argued for the need to retain separate intelligence capabilities. The Department of Defense (DoD) in particular was concerned that a centralized intelligence organization would detract from its ability to collect on its own requirements.
President Truman was sympathetic to the interests of the DoD and other agencies and therefore established the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) as a means of organizing intelligence analysis in a decentralized fashion. The CIG was envisioned to serve as a clearinghouse of intelligence information to ensure requirements at the national level were analyzed and disseminated according to the President’s priorities.
In a case study for the fact that the President does not always get his way, the CIG very quickly took on a life of its own until eventually emerging from the fray as what we think of today as the CIA. The scope of the CIA’s mission was expanded very early on to include autonomous collection capabilities, all brought under the oversight of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Over time, national intelligence came to include a variety of organizations responsible for managing collection and analysis of different types and for different consumers (Zegart, 1999).
Military Intelligence
Military intelligence refers to intelligence about issues in which there is a foreign-military nexus. Intelligence activities focused on indications and warnings of surprise attacks fall primarily in the realm of military intelligence. In this respect, military intelligence pays particular attention at the strategic level to changes in other nation’s military posture – whether they call up reserve forces, purchase new weapons systems, move naval resources into or out of an area, etc. (Lowenthal, 2012).
Military intelligence covers wartime intelligence collection in areas designated for combat operations. The DoD operate a command in North America that, among its other missions, assists in counterterrorism missions in the United States, and during times of emergency it can be called up to assist local law enforcement agencies. Otherwise, the US Constitution forbids the military from enforcing civil law, which includes leverage military intelligence capabilities to assist criminal intelligence operations where there is no foreign-military nexus (White, 2012).
The primary coordinating organization in the United States for military intelligence is the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The DIA serves location where the military services share information and coordinate their intelligence activities. It also contains an autonomous collection capability to conduct intelligence operations on military intelligence interests. Each branch of the military also has its own intelligence capability serving its unique needs. The Army’s intelligence activities are unique in that they specifically do NOT include criminal activity, which falls under the Criminal Intelligence Division (CID).
All other branches of service (remember that the Coast Guard falls under the Department of Homeland Security, NOT the DoD) house their military intelligence and criminal intelligence functions within single organizations, although they still require a foreign-military nexus to conduct operations.
Law Enforcement Intelligence
The category of intelligence of most interest to us in this course is law enforcement intelligence, also known as criminal intelligence.
Criminal intelligence operations, unlike national and military intelligence operations, are subject to legal scrutiny, and this has profound effects on the parameters of law enforcement intelligence as an intelligence terrain. Criminal intelligence, for example, cannot be gathered, analyzed, or even stored unless there is compelling reason to believe it directly relates to a crime that has or will take place.
Criminal intelligence supports the law enforcement community in its mission to protect rights, even the rights of those who have been arrested. It seeks to anticipate, detect, and reveal criminal activity with the intent of being that activity to an orderly conclusion. It is governed by the rules of evidence. Criminal intelligence operations, through all 6 steps of the intelligence cycle, must withstand external scrutiny during court proceedings. Compare criminal intelligence’s key terrain features with those of the national and military intelligence terrains: National and military intelligence is about protecting targets, not rights. Their collection operations are subject to the scrutiny of intelligence oversight mechanisms, but not the scrutiny of the public in most circumstances (White, 2012).
As you may recall from other criminal justice courses, evidence used in court is subject to the exclusionary rule. The exclusionary rule states that prosecuting authorities cannot use evidence gathered through illegal or otherwise prohibited means against a defendant in trial. The exclusionary rule derives from three lines of thinking within our criminal justice system.
First, in order for the court to exercise its claim as the legitimate arbiter of the rule of law, it must itself avoid engaging in or otherwise sponsoring activity that is against the law.
Second, the law enforcement community has, in the past, engaged in illegal activity motivated at least in part by the intention of increasing its chances of prosecution in court. By not accepting illegally acquired evidence in a trial, the court discourages the law enforcement community from breaking the law to secure a prosecution.
Third, if the law enforcement community secures a prosecution through the use of illegally acquired evidence, then the convicted defendant is granted standing for damages. So even though the defendant may be found guilty, he or she can pursue civil action against the law enforcement organization who collected the evidence illegally. The Supreme Court determined that use of civil actions as remedies for such damages would constitute an onerous burden for the criminal justice system and waylay the dispensation of justice for the greater benefit (Neubauer & Meinhold, 2010).
The legal scrutiny to which evidence presented in courts must be put ensures proper due process. This standard defines the parameters within which the law enforcement community must conduct its intelligence activities or risk having trial after trial dismissed. If a criminal intelligence analyst does not perform her duties with due diligence to the law, then what, after all, is the use of her intelligence products?
Law enforcement officers and prosecuting attorneys at all levels gather criminal intelligence for the purposes of securing convictions in formal legal proceedings. This end use means that all criminal intelligence activities must start from a reasonable suspicion of activity. The law enforcement intelligence community includes a much looser organization than national or military intelligence communities, but in every case it involves intelligence activities at the service of organizations whose mission is to enforce the laws at various echelons of our government.
As mentioned earlier, the FBI is responsible for federal law enforcement. In order to facilitate information sharing and to increase the efficiency of criminal intelligence activities, Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) were established. JTTFs exist in most metropolitan cities and control territories that cover the entire United States. They have so far proven very for bringing resources to local law enforcement organizations to which they would not have access otherwise, and somewhat useful for pushing information up to federal organizations that they would not have access to otherwise.
One of the key advantages of JTTFs is that all participating officers have security clearances that allow them access to information they may find useful for supporting those organizations they have national defense missions, although they cannot use this information for criminal prosecutions.
Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence, also sometimes referred to as business intelligence, is perhaps the newest member of the intelligence landscape, though that position is debatable. Competitive intelligence concerns the collection of information about the activities, plans, and intentions of the business community for the business community.
Most large companies have competitive intelligence organizations tasked with providing business executives the information they need to advance their company’s interests and secure them a competitive advantage. To be clear, competitive intelligence is NOT industrial espionage. Industrial espionage involves stealing information or products from a competitive, and it is always illegal.
Competitive intelligence professionals routinely analyze business information in order to predict new trends in markets and how competitors are attempting to manage them. Much information about a company is publicly available, either through tradeshows, financial portfolios, business news media outlets, and the like. When employees transfer between companies, a HUMINT collector in the field of competitive intelligence may debrief them about the projects they were working on in their last position.
Competitive intelligence often concerns itself with risk analysis to make recommendations to executives about the dangers or advantages of alternative courses of action. The supplementary text available in the Lessons menu for this week is an article from the International Journal of Information Management that describes how the competitive intelligence terrain can benefit from exposure to the other terrains (Powell & Bradford, 2000). You may want to review it in more detail than we will discuss it here because it includes an excellent example of using the target-centric approach to analysis to model an organization’s behaviors based on information the organization would be unlikely or unable to hide from public view.
In the article, Bradford and Powell show how a competitive business unit can construct a model of their company’s interactions with the operations of a competitor even when the competitor attempts to conceal sensitive information. They start by finding information that is publicly available and plugging that information into a common business model that explains a certain aspect of an enterprise’s operations that may not be as publicly available.
By doing this they establish a model adapted for a particular competitor off of which a competitive intelligence analyst can establish thresholds where changes in known values should indicate changes in unknown values inside the competitor firm. Figure 2 shows a dynamic process model where the values of different aspects of a company’s operations are known to increase or decrease based on changes to other values. Such models help predict how a competitor will react to changes in the market, or what their future plans and intentions may be.
References
Clark, R.M. (2007). Intelligence analysis: A target-centric approach (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: CQ Press.
Lowenthal, M.M. (2012). Intelligence: From secrets to policy (5th ed.). Washington, DC: CQ Press.
Martin, G. (2013). Understanding terrorism: Challenges, perspectives, and issues (4th ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Neubauer, D.W., & Meinhold, S.S. (2010). Judicial process: Law, courts, and politics in the United States (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth.
Powell, J.H., & Bradford, J.P. (2000). Targeting intelligence gathering in a dynamic competitive environment. International Journal of Information Management, 20, 181-95.
White, J.R. (2012). Terrorism & homeland security (7th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
