OPINION / Remaining attentive through the last tactical mile

Dennis Blair

Three administration intelligence officials appeared before two separate Senate committees on January 20 to discuss specifically the failure to keep the alleged Christmas Day underwear bomber off the Northwest Airlines flight, but more generally to describe the difficulty in making the crucial, final intelligence connections in what the officials termed the "last tactical mile."

They all acknowledged that various U.S. intelligence operatives and analysts had collected various bits and pieces of the story that should have fingered Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. But they also pointed out the huge challenge in spotting one unique and genuinely threatening piece of information among the thousands of pieces of data the Intelligence Community receives and processes each and every day.

 "Although we must and will do better, we must also recognize that not all of the pieces rise above the noise level," Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, and Michael Leiter, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, in their prepared testimony. They were joined by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Blair talked about the progress that the Intelligence Community has made in recent years in improving intelligence sharing throughout the federal government, as well as between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies and fusion centers. Blair seemed particularly proud of the Intelligence Community's "collaborative tools," such as:

Intellipedia, the Intelligence Community's version of Wikipedia, which was announced in 2006 and now allows 16 intelligence agencies and other national security-related offices to collaborate with Top Secret, Secret and Sensitive But Unclassified information;

A-Space, or Analytic Space, which is a project developed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that enables intelligence analysts to use a collaborative work space to gain access to interagency databases, Web-based messaging and other tools;

iVideo, a video sharing Web site, akin to YouTube, that offers Top Secret videos to the intelligence agencies, Secret information to the Defense and State Departments, and Sensitive But Unclassified video to other government employees as well as some outsiders; and,

Intelink, the secure intranet used by the Intelligence Community since 1994 to promote the dissemination of intelligence information.

Advances like these and others can make a huge difference in intelligence collection and analysis, but it seems to me that more attention needs to be focused on the inherent – and virtually unavoidable – quality in human nature to lose attentiveness when one is swimming in a vast ocean of information.

In the physical security field, it has long been recognized that security personnel cannot monitor a large bank of video screens – each streaming a different scene, often without anything interesting happening – for more than 20 minutes or so, before their eyes glaze over and they lose all attentiveness. The security industry has tried to address this short human attention span by developing video analytic software, which supposedly can spot behavior "anomalies" within a few seconds and trigger the appropriate alert, and will never tire of looking at dozens or hundreds of video feeds. Unfortunately, though these analytic packages can indeed remain vigilant for weeks on end, they have not yet proven to be as accurate or useful as promised.

So, the question becomes: How can an individual intelligence analyst remain alert and attentive when he or she is reviewing fragmentary pieces of preliminary intelligence about an individual who has not yet been identified as a bona fide terrorist threat? Put another way: If the analyst is reviewing bits and pieces of data about 50 separate individuals on a particular day – and none of the "derogatory" information about any one individual rises to a level that is unquestionably worrisome – how does the analyst determine which of the 50 potential paths he ought to pursue that day?

It is, of course, easy to say after-the-fact that an analyst could have – and should have – assembled the entire mosaic that would have revealed the underwear bomber's Christmas day plot, but that would have required more attentiveness to seemingly unimportant details at the time than most human beings seem to possess.