The Future of Intelligence

Challenges in the 21st century

Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Ben de Jong, Joop Reijn, Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Ben de Jong, Joop van Reijn

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135095635
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Inteligencia y espionaje

This volume discusses the challenges the future holds for different aspects of the intelligence process and for organisations working in the field.

The main focus of Western intelligence services is no longer on the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union and its allies. Instead, at present, there is a plethora of threats and problems that deserve attention. Some of these problems are short-term and potentially acute, such as terrorism. Others, such as the exhaustion of natural resources, are longer-term and by nature often more difficult to foresee in their implications.

This book analyses the different activities that make up the intelligence process, or the 'intelligence cycle', with a focus on changes brought about by external developments in the international arena, such as technology and security threats. Drawing together a range of key thinkers in the field, The Future of Intelligence examines possible scenarios for future developments, including estimations about their plausibility, and the possible consequences for the functioning of intelligence and security services.

This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, strategic studies, foreign policy, security studies and IR in general.

1 By way of introduction

A systemic way of looking at the future of intelligence

Bob de Graaff

DOI: 10.4324/9780203071472-1

Introduction

It is possible to think of an intelligence organization or an intelligence community as part of an open societal system in transition (De Haan and Rotmans 2011: 90–102; De Graaff 1997: 25–32). In this line of thought the intelligence organization operates in an environment that may be defined in terms of both tasks and values. The task environment consists of all the actors that may have an influence upon the intelligence organization and/or may be influenced by its acts and products. The value environment is the cultural and ideological climate in which the organization has to operate. The larger systems (of security, politics or the military), of which the intelligence organization or community forms a subsystem, set out the wider environment in which this takes place. The inter-action between the organization and its environments) may be interpreted in terms of input and output.

Input may be divided into support and demand (from the perspective of an intelligence organization these may also be interpreted in terms of threats and opportunities). Support may be defined in terms of money or other material means, but also recruited or contracted employees, or information that has to be processed into intelligence. Demand may be defined as the intelligence consumers’ requirements or public expectations. Demands may come from politics or the public at large regarding the organization’s performance, products, and legal or ethical restrictions. They may also take the form of information that the organization is forced to act upon in order to maintain itself in its specific environment.

The output of an intelligence organization comprises finished intelligence, but may also include covert actions or active measures. The processes within the intelligence organization that convert support and demand into output could be called ‘throughput’ or ‘withinput’. This throughput covers parts of the so-called intelligence cycle, such as processing the information (decrypting, translation, photo-interpretation and so on), assessment, evaluation and analysis. These are the processes that transform raw intelligence into finished intelligence. Through-puts may also include the decision-making process within the intelligence organization that leads up to certain actions.

It is against this backdrop of a systemic approach that I would like to introduce the various contributions on the future of intelligence which make up this volume.

Future threats

When one addresses possible futures of intelligence one would ideally hope to be able to sketch a picture that would address all parts of this open system: changes in task and value environments, shifts in support and demand functions, modifications in working processes, and alterations in production and output. However, much of the thinking on the future of intelligence merely emphasizes changes in the threat environment.

It is of course difficult enough to foresee the future. Who could have foretold in 1928 the coming economic collapse of 1929, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, the alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies in 1941, and the division of Europe into a democratic, capitalist Western part and a totalitarian communist Eastern part in the aftermath of the Second World War, all in a mere seventeen years? Some of these occurrences could theoretically have been on the radar screen of the intelligence and security services of that period. A similar case could be made for 1988. Which agency could have foreseen the end of Soviet communism, the reunification of Germany, the Al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington DC, the start of a global war on terror, the possibility of an electronic Pearl Harbor, the introduction of the euro and the debate over its possible demise?

Foreseeing the future is of course an intractable problem. Still, intelligence and security agencies have a more than average need to try to predict future probabilities. First, one of their core functions is to provide early warning for both threats and opportunities. If any government organization needs to have foreknowledge of events it should be intelligence agencies. Second, intelligence-gathering capacities often require heavy investment of time and money. Satellite programs, for instance, are very expensive and need to be developed over a long period of time. Human agents generally tend to cost much less, but they need time to be trained and cultivated before they can be activated. A military intelligence service should not only be able to gather the necessary information to protect the armed forces in the present, but should also be considering how forces may be deployed and what adversaries they may face in the future. Assessments of future military opponents and the types of conflict that may be fought have important implications for military investments. Third, as Mark Lowenthal notes in his contribution to this volume, intelligence analysts should have the opportunity to build up deep knowledge about a possible future threat before a crisis develops, instead of rushing from one crisis to the other. Fourth, intelligence agencies are created and used to reduce (or, for Gregory Treverton, assess and manage) the uncertainties of decision-makers and politicians. Few things are as uncertain as the future. The more ominous threats become (the suspicion that a terrorist organization may obtain weapons of mass destruction), the greater the need for ‘pre-emptive intelligence’ to support ‘pre-emptive action’ against possible risks and threats, as David Omand phrases it in his chapter.

This tension between mandate and ability regarding the future makes one curious about what students and (former) practitioners of intelligence have to say about the future of their own field. It is understandable that many of the contributors here devote attention to current trends and their extrapolation, rather than to possible futures that cannot yet be discerned in the present. When one looks at the threats that are mentioned, the authors agree on most of them: non-state actors, terrorists, proliferators, organized crime, cyber threats, food shortages, pandemics, migration patterns, and (perhaps the worst of all) information overload (see also Bamford 2004: 111; Shultz 2005; Turner 2006: 57; Treverton 2009: 15; Agrell 2009:111; Lahneman 2010:214; Meeuws 2010; Aid 2012:213,215).

However, it may not be the threats which these experts agree upon that are the most dangerous, but exactly the ones they do not even mention. The fact that there is so much agreement among them could rather be a cause for concern. Where is the out-of-the-box thinking, where is the imagination that takes us into a dark world of unknowns? Or is the future already dark enough as it is? Above all, is it complex because the threats have become blurred? (Blair 2010: 45–46; Thomas 2008: 146).

I think everyone will indeed agree that the task environments of intelligence agencies have become more complex. Not only state actors, but an increasing number of non-state actors may become opponents. The clustering of possible opponents along the lines of the Cold War dichotomy has been superseded by an ever-increasing multitude of state and (especially) non-state actors that may enter into all kinds of temporary relationships hidden from preying eyes and lis-tening ears. Furthermore, intelligence has become a phenomenon that seems to have penetrated every aspect of social life. Not only is intelligence more and more appreciated in the armed forces and law enforcement circles, as the chapters by Monica den Boer and Jelle van Buuren illustrate, but today almost every individual who uses the internet behaves like an intelligence officer or agent: using passwords, encrypting messages, employing cover names, creating net-works, and using satellite pictures to look, for instance, at one’s neighbour’s estate (Wheaton 2012; Warner 2012: 148). After the Second World War the heads of some Western intelligence agencies were championing a government monopoly on intelligence gathering similar to the government’s monopoly on violence, a position that is now unthinkable (De Graaff and Wiebes 1992; Krieger 2009: 100). These days, private intelligence companies and contractors flourish, and no longer only in the United States (Bean 2011: 9,14). As Wilhelm Agrell argues, the more complicated the tasks of intelligence agencies become and the more technologically advanced the techniques that are required, the more these same agencies will depend on private initiatives.

It seems to be only a question of time before a group of friends will establish an intelligence agency not for a living but for a noble cause or even just for fun. Treverton mentions the Grey Balloons initiative where people were asked to volunteer working a few hours a week, unpaid, to assist intelligence agencies to do their job. But one might imagine that in some cases, if the work is unpaid anyway, people may decide to do it for themselves instead of working for an agency that benefits from the results. One does not have to be a Marxist to understand that many would loathe this kind of alienation from what they produce. Treverton does see possibilities for amateur intelligence that may compete with official agencies — why not, in the ‘age of the amateur’? (Keen 2007; Reynolds 2006: 92). Such a private initiative has existed since October 2011 : Open Briefing (see www.openbriefing.org). What will be the consequences for established intelligence agencies if such private endeavors produce better results than they do? Treverton recommends seeking help as a key to reshaping intelligence. That is both a noble and humble approach, but hardly one that seems to square with the public notion that intelligence agencies are there to come to the rescue by supplying the right information at the right moment.

Another question regarding the distinctive position of intelligence agencies is generated by the identification of new types of threat. If, for instance, climate change and pandemics result in security threats, how great will the distinction then be between the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Health Organization on the one ha...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 By way of introduction: a systemic way of looking at the future of intelligence
• 2 The future of intelligence: what are the threats, the challenges and the opportunities?
• 3 The future of intelligence: changing threats, evolving methods
• 4 Is the US intelligence community anti-intellectual?
• 5 The future of the intelligence process: the end of the intelligence cycle?
• 6 The future of counter-intelligence: the twenty-first-century challenge
• 7 Analysing international intelligence cooperation: institutions or intelligence assemblages?
• 8 European intelligence cooperation
• 9 Intelligence-led policing in Europe: lingering between idea and implementation
• 10 The next hundred years: reflections on the future of intelligence
• 11 Conclusions: it may be 10 September 2001 today
• Index