igf 13 6 final

The Magazine of the National Intelligence Community

Analytic Revolutionary

Lt. Gen. Robert P. OttoDeputy Chief of Staff/ISRAir Force

Mission Planning O Open-Source Intelligence O Analytic ToolsGEOINT Big Data O IC Contractors O GEOINT Education

September 2015 Volume 13, Issue 6

www.GIF-kmi.com

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Cover / Q&AFeatures

Lieutenant GeneraL robert P. otto

Deputy Chief of Staff for ISRU.S. Air Force

16

Departments Industry Interview2 editor’s PersPective3 ProGram notes4 PeoPLe14 industry raster27 resource center

terry ryanFederal Government Sales ManagerLizardTech

September 2015Volume 13, Issue 6INTELLIGENCE & GEOSPATIAL FORUM

6PartnerinG for Geoint education reformationNew workforce development initiatives are being launched this fall by Riverside Research, the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation and the Air Force Institute of Technology. This unique industry, academia and government alliance teamed up to bring additional education and training opportunities to the geospatial intelligence community.By ElizaBEth Davis

9ideas for inteLLiGenceSeeking to help military, intelligence, homeland security and other organizations navigate the rivers of information that inundate them every day, a new platform is bringing users and application developers together to find or create the analytical tools they need.By harrison DonnElly

11oPen for inteLLiGenceAs the world of social media continues to grow and morph into a dazzling array of new formats and capabilities, the U.S. intelligence community is looking for new ways to take advantage of this seemingly inexhaustible but unmanageable wellspring of open-source information.By harrison DonnElly

19overseeinG ic contractorsA Congressional Research Service report entitled “The Intelligence Community and Its Use of Contractors: Congressional Oversight Issues” was issued in August 2015 and made publicly available by the Federation of American Scientists.

28

“Everyone talks about the era of big data, but

what we are really saying is that

there is a great deal of potential

information out there, but

we have tended historically to

focus on a very small percentage

of it. Could we get some game-changers if we could access

more information and use it in

different ways?”

— Lieutenant General Robert

P. Otto100% Dedicated to the Mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community

Now in our 13TH year!

23GeosPatiaL’s biG data chaLLenGeWhen discussing the challenges posed by big data, analysts speak of volume, variety, velocity and veracity. Geospatial intelligence is the ultimate big-data scenario where all of these issues are confronted with huge volumes of data coming off numerous platforms and sensors, high-streaming rates combined with rapid data aging and homogenization of data sets with different formats, structures and quality.By PEtEr BuxBaum

20reaL-time mission PLanninGThe presence of technology not only makes the possibility of mission planning much more fluid and precise, but also raises the expectations of the mission planning process, which in turn challenges the technologies to perform that much better and in real time. Geospatial intelligence and mission planning are inextricably linked.By PEtEr BuxBaum

A new Department of Defense/industry partnership to develop the next generation of bendable and wearable electronic devices is high-lighting ongoing efforts by the military and intelligence communities to encourage innovation by building ties with private-sector organizations on the cutting edge of technology.

The Silicon Valley-based FlexTech Alliance, launched with $75 million in DoD funding as well as a larger amount in non-federal contributions, will be the seventh manufacturing innovation institute established by the Obama administration to create centers of collabora-tion throughout the tech industry. It is also of a piece with programs by intelligence community members such as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency to take advantage of advances by organizations outside of their traditional ranks of contractors.

The Institute for Flexible Hybrid Electronics, which will follow in the footsteps of innovation centers dedicated to topics such as 3-D printing and integrated photonics, will focus on new techniques in electronic device handling and high-precision printing on flexible, stretchable substrates. The resulting products could include wearable devices and health monitoring technologies, the Pentagon said, and “will certainly increase the variety and capability of sensors that already interconnect the world.”

Operating at the juncture of electronics and high-precision printing, flexible hybrid electronics can create sensors that conform to the curves of a human body or stretch around machines or buildings to monitor their condition. In addition to medical and industrial applications, a White House fact sheet supporting the program noted that the benefits could include next-generation imaging and sensing capabilities, as well as much smaller and lighter ISR devices for aircraft.

The recent announcement also follows Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s establishment of the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental near Sunnyvale, Calif. As a DoD statement explained, “The innovative culture of Silicon Valley, in collaboration with DoD initiatives and the department’s world-class laboratories, will accelerate military tech-nology development cycles and focus on critical DoD needs while also creating new commercial opportunities.”

Harrison DonnellyEDitor

EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE


editorialManaging Editorharrison Donnelly [email protected]

Copy EditorsKevin harris [email protected] magin [email protected]

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Intelligence & Geospatial Forum

Volume 13, Issue 6 • September 2015

Army Master Sergeant Steven Lotz, a geospatial analyst for the 416th Theater Engineer Command, is the first member of the unit’s newly formed geospatial cell. [Photo courtesy of U.S. Army/by Master Sergeant Michel Sauret]

www.GIF-kmi.com IGF 1 3 . 6 | 3

PROGRAM NOTES Compiled by KMI Media Group staff

NGA Aims South by SouthwestThe National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has submitted two

proposals to participate for the first time at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival scheduled for March 11-15, 2016, in Austin, Texas.

NGA’s panel proposals are among more than 6,000 submitted this year. To help determine which panels are selected, the festival released the SXSW Panel Picker, an online tool developed to enhance community participation in the process.

“SXSW is the premier event in the country for new ideas and creative technologies,” said Ben Tuttle, NGA mobile apps team lead. “But we need help to get there.”

If selected, it would be NGA’s first trip to the annual festival, which attracted more than 30,000 attendants from more than 85 countries in 2015.

“When it comes to developing mobile applications or engaging with the open-source community, NGA is leading the way within the intelli-gence community,” said Tuttle. “SXSW represents a unique opportunity for NGA to show the world the kind of innovative and inventive agency we really have become.”

Following are NGA’s descriptions of its submissions, voting for which was ending as this issue went to press:

• FindpiratesfromyourcouchNGA is in your local mobile app store and on GitHub. With NGA’s apps

you can find pirates from your couch and access geospatial information even when you don’t have a network connection. And, with the source code for these apps on GitHub, you can help make these projects even better. Our goal is to increase the impact of government investments and take things in new directions. Got an innovative geospatial-flavored mobile app of

your own? We’re all ears. We even have a program to pay you for it. NGA is the nation’s primary source of geospatial intelligence. • WhatintheworldisNGA?

Calling all map geeks and data nerds. We’re opening up for a look at a day in NGA. What’s NGA? Basically, anyone who navigates with a cellphone relies on us. Staff will discuss working on complex intel questions in our new unclassified lab, providing disaster relief support (and making that data publicly available) in world crises like the Ebola outbreak and Nepal earthquake, and some of the cool tech being developed by our R&D team. Want to get involved? We’ll show you what we’re sharing on GitHub and what areas we are hiring in.

Satellite Cryocooler Supports High-Resolution ImageryLockheed Martin scientists are packing

three times thepowerdensity intoakey satel-lite cooling system. The project continues thecompany’s effort to reduce component size,enabling compact, higher-power spacecraftpayloads and smaller sensor platforms backonEarth.

Satellite sensors and cameras and othersophisticated electronics have to be cooled todetect what they’re designed to capture, eventotemperaturesaslowas-320F.Smallercryo-coolers mean more affordable satellites andlaunches, and have applications on Earth aswell. With higher power, this microcryocoolerenableslarger,moresensitiveIRsensors,whichis especially useful for very high-resolutionimages.Despite its increasedcapability, thecomponent’spowerefficiencyratingisroughlythesameaslower-powercoolers.

The High Power Microcryocooler is a high-reliabilitysystem designed for continuous operation over a lifespan inexcess of 10 years, and is the industry’s highest-power-density

cryocoolingsystem.Itdeliversmorethan150wattsperkilogram,a significant advancement from the 30-60 watts per kilogramratingmost space-rated cryocoolers deliver. It alsoweighs lessthan a pound, which is less than half the weight of similarcoolingsystems.

www.GIF-kmi.com4 | IGF 1 3 . 6

Army BrigadierGeneralChristopherF.Bentley has been assigned as deputy director for operations, National Joint Operations Intelligence Center, Operations Team-1, J-3, Joint Staff.

RaymondCook has been appointed as the next intelligence community chief informa-tion officer, replacing AlTarasiuk. Cook is currently director of the Office of Space Reconnaissance within CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, where he is leading their efforts to integrate NRO’s fulfilment of its IC mission as NRO director of mission operations. Before joining NRO, he led multi-agency IT infrastructure, data sharing and compliance within CIA.

Marcel Lettre

MarcelLettre has been nominated by President Obama as the under secretary of defense for intelligence, replacing Michael Vickers. Previously, Lettre served as the prin-cipal deputy under secretary. In that post, he also was the program executive for the Military Intelligence Program, and dual-hatted as director of defense intelligence for the director of national intelligence.

From 2011 to 2013, Lettre served as a special assistant to secretaries of defense Chuck Hagel, Leon Panetta and Bob Gates, serving as deputy chief of staff to Panetta. Lettre also led both the Gates-Panetta and Panetta-Hagel transition teams. From 2009 to 2011, he served as principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for legisla-tive affairs. In these roles, he supported the secretary of defense on defense strategy and budget development, crisis management, cyber initiatives, sensitive intelligence and counterterrorism operational decisions, significant acquisition and R&D investments and strategic nuclear and arms control matters.

From 2005 to 2009, Lettre served as senior defense and intelligence adviser and then as senior national security adviser to the Senate majority leader, handling all “Gang of Eight” intelligence matters for the leader. Lettre has a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a bach-elor’s from the University of the South.

Jason Matheny

JasonMatheny has been named as director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). He has been serving as director of IARPA’s new office for anticipating surprise, overseeing research efforts to develop new capabilities to deliver timely and accurate forecasts for a range of events relevant to national security. He served concurrently as the program manager for the Open Source Indicators (OSI), Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition and Forecasting Science and Technology programs.

Matheny joined the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2009 as a program manager in IARPA’s office of incisive analysis, where he conceptualized, developed, managed and successfully transitioned technologies to the IC from the Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) and OSI programs. Under his leadership, the ACE program became the world’s largest forecasting tournament and increased the accuracy of geopolitical fore-casts by more than 50 percent.

Colorado-based Surrey Satellite Technology US has added StephenEisele and RickSanford to its business development team. Eisele and Sanford joinBrentAbbott and report to Chief Operating Officer DougGerull in the company’s focus on developing new business and expanding existing oppor-tunities within the U.S. aerospace market.

Robert J. Fleming

Northrop Grumman has appointed RobertJ.Fleming vice president of cyber, unat-tended systems and division strategy for the company’s land and self protection systems division, where he will be responsible for the development, production and support of the division’s unmanned aircraft systems sensor and electronic attack programs.

Wesley D. Kremer

Raytheon has appointed WesleyD.Kremer as president, Integrated Defense Systems.

Daryl Madden

Textron Systems has promoted DarylMadden to senior vice president and general manager of its Geospatial Solutions business. In this role, Madden sets the strategic path for the Geospatial Solutions business, which provides products and services for visualizing, interpreting and managing geospatial data in ways that improve situational understanding and deliver actionable intelligence to the user.

PEOPLE Compiled by KMI Media Group staff

Textron Systems Geospatial Solutions is a business of Textron Systems.GeoCatalog is a trademark of Overwatch Systems, Ltd.

© 2015 Overwatch Systems, Ltd. All rights reserved.

I N G E N U I T Y A C C E L E R A T E D

textronsystems.com/[email protected]

GEOCATALOG

TM: SERVICE-ENABLED DATA MANAGEMENT & DISCOVERY

BIG DATA, BIGGER SOLUTIONS

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USA

USA

USA

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ABC2

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XYZ5

8.5

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Format GSD Country Image ID Mission NIIRS

Analysts today need on-demand access to vast geospatial data to generate time-dominant, mission-critical intelligence products. GeoCatalog is the premier data management framework that drives that process: an initiative end-to-end solution for performing advanced geospatial data management.

From a remote, safe place anywhere in the world, GeoCatalog software enables analysts to derive the knowledge they need to accomplish the mission.


New textbook houses a Never-before-seeN breadth aNd depth of specialized iNformatioN relevaNt to GeoiNt discipliNes.

by elizabeth davis

Partnering for GEOINT Education Reformation

IGF 1 3 . 6 | 7 www.GIF-kmi.com

Few workforce development initiatives are being launched this fall from Riverside Research, the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) and the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT). This unique industry, academia and government alli-ance teamed up to bring additional education and training opportunities to the geospatial intelligence community. After identifying shared interests and collaborating extensively, the accomplishments of this partnership exemplify the progress that can be made by working together.

The call for communitywide collaboration was made from the stage at USGIF’s GEOINT 2015 Symposium, where National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Director Robert Cardillo figuratively picked up the phone and dialed the numbers of all GEOINT professionals. Whether the director is an iPhone or Android guy cannot be said, but it is clear that Riverside Research, AFIT and USGIF picked up his call on the first ring.

Riverside Research and AFIT recently unveiled the result of an effort that united entities from academia, industry and government to produce a much-needed educational resource for the GEOINT community. “The Phenomenology of Intelligence-focused Remote Sensing,” a textbook written by Riverside Research senior technical experts with support from AFIT, houses a never-before-seen breadth and depth of specialized information rele-vant to GEOINT disciplines, and will be used to sup-plement USGIF’s Universal GEOINT Certification. Current practitioners, aspiring professionals, techni-cal students and academic faculty can now add this textbook to their desks.

Riverside Research, a not-for-profit company primarily serving the Department of Defense, is chartered to advance scientific research in support of the U.S. government and in the public interest. Equipped with qualified senior technical experts and fortified by their status as an accredited provider of DoD-approved education and training, the company entered a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement in 2009 with its long-standing partner, AFIT, and set out to lead a momentous undertaking: the creation of this first-of-its-kind textbook.

“Until now, there was no textbook that applies scientific principles to geospatial remote sensing

for intelligence purposes,” said Dr. Steven Fiorino, research associate professor and director, Center

for Directed Energy, AFIT. “There were only note packages and PowerPoint presenta-

tions. So, this textbook is truly the first of its kind and satisfies a deep need.”

Momentous in significance and scale, the resource fills a void for professionals, students and educators. The unclassi-fied, graduate-level textbook is the first

to include phenomenology, sensors, data analysis and intelligence applications under one cover.

Pooling the collective knowledge of its authors—Drs. Howard Evans, James Lange and James Schmitz—which spans over three decades of spe-cialized instruction in electro-optical remote-sens-ing technologies and geospatial applications, “The Phenomenology of Intelligence-focused Remote Sensing” thoroughly discusses all the necessary ele-ments of spatial, spectral and temporal signature col-lection in the visible and infrared spectra.

‘The Phenomenology of Intelligence-focused Remote Sensing’ represents a truly meaningful milestone in the evolution of teaching the technical components of GEOINT phenomenology,” said Keith Masback, CEO of USGIF. “It is fully comprehensive, yet written in a readily understood, engaging style. This text should be part of every GEOINT profession-al’s library and will serve as a superb basic or applied remote-sensing reference.”

GeoiNt certificatioN

Current global, national and industry landscapes necessitate the standardization of GEOINT educa-tion and training. Although there have been stan-dardization attempts since the term GEOINT was written into law in 2003, the need is more critical now than ever before. The continuous threats to national security from foreign adversaries and the rapid growth of science, technology, engineering and math job markets nationwide, not to mention the gradual merging of GEOINT and remote-sensing skill sets, are pressing the GEOINT community to refocus previous attempts and create a clear career path for students and professionals.

USGIF has been supporting the workforce for the past 12 years, awarding more than $800,000 in scholarships to high school seniors, college students and graduate candidates. In the past seven years, USGIF has accredited 12 academic institutions to award GEOINT certificates. Now, USGIF is extend-ing this pipeline to the professional certification and continuing education of practitioners by offering the first Universal GEOINT Certification.

To be offered this fall to U.S. and international professionals across the spectrum of military, aca-demia and federal, state and local government, the Universal GEOINT Certification will benefit all com-munity stakeholders. Certification allows practitio-ners to demonstrate their ability to perform above the skill level at which they were hired, making them more marketable professionally. Standardized education and training, as well as the transpar-ent approach to its development that USGIF has embraced, increases credibility and awareness for the GEOINT profession and industry overall.


PHENOMENOLOGY • SENSORS • INTELLIGENCE APPLICATIONS

FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND

Remote Sensing Textbook

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All textbook proceeds will be donated to the Ken Miller Scholarship for Advanced Remote Sensing Applications.

Scholarship Program

www.riversideresearch.org/textbookORDER HERE

“This book benchmarks the state of understanding so our next generation of engineers and scientists can innovate and advance intelligence tradecraft.”—Jeffrey K. Harris, Former Director of the National Reconnaissance Office

“This text should be part of every GEOINT professional’s library and will readily serve as a superb basic or applied remote sensing reference.”—Keith J. Masback, CEO, United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation

“This book is an excellent reference for anyone working in the Intelligence Community.”—Hon. Jim Longley, Jr., Executive Director, Advanced Technical Intelligence Association

There are many paths to becoming a GEOINT professional, and not everyone will choose to complete USGIF’s certification pro-gram. However, those who do will prove their value to the com-munity through a standardized, measurable method. Certified practitioners will gain professional differentiation and will be dis-tinguished as among the best in their field.

Approved for release by the Air Force with concurrence from the National Reconnaissance Office and NGA, “The Phenomenology of Intelligence-focused Remote Sensing” will be used as a sup-plemental resource to the education and training built into the certification.

“Riverside Research is honored to support USGIF and the Universal GEOINT Certification,” said Richard Annas, president of Riverside Research. “This textbook is a tool to aid workforce devel-opment, which is poised for acceleration with the implementation of this certification. As a not-for-profit scientific research company, we are in a unique position to give back to those that contribute not only to our success, but also to the prosperity of the nation. The GEOINT workforce is a key contributor; the textbook and the certification will ensure sustained excellence in the workforce and the workforce’s highly critical contributions to national security.”

workforce developmeNt

“The Phenomenology of Intelligence-focused Remote Sensing” will not only support the new certification, but its sales revenues

also will fund a new USGIF scholarship. The Ken Miller Scholarship for Advanced Remote Sensing Applications benefits students pursu-ing degrees in intelligence-related disciplines and is being offered for the first time this fall.

“To partner with a great institution like Riverside Research, with their rich heritage and history, really is the best the founda-tion has to offer,” said Masback. “We are stronger as an organization when our member organizations partner with us to do things. So, the ability to have some of the revenue that comes from this text-book go to our scholarship fund and endow a scholarship for some-one studying remote sensing is a phenomenal opportunity.”

These workforce development initiatives—the textbook, stan-dardization of education and training, and new scholarship fund—are the culmination of efforts to break down barriers within the GEOINT community. Previously unreachable outcomes can be realized by integrating the existing expertise of industry, academia and government units and supporting common initiatives. Pick up the phone: progress is calling. O

Elizabeth Davis is a public relations associate with Riverside Research.

For more information, contact IGF Editor Harrison Donnelly at [email protected] or search our online archives

for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.


Seeking to help military, intelligence, homeland security and other organizations navigate the rivers of information that inundate them every day, a new concept is bringing users and application developers together to find or create the analytical tools they need.

“If you think about the data explosion environ-ment we’re in today, it’s difficult to sort through all the information and come up with actionable out-

comes. So you have to have tools, methodologies and approaches that enable you to be success-

ful,” noted Kent Matlick, senior vice presi-dent and general manager, Mission Integration

Group, for government/intelligence services pro-vider Vencore.

Established by Vencore, the Intelligent Data Exploitation and Analytics System (IDEAS) platform is dedicated to delivering online solutions in a cost-effec-tive way that takes advantage of existing infrastructure and processes, while also using simple interfaces and visualizations to make them accessible to non-experts. It can be accessed at www.geomarketspace.com.

Kent Matlick

platform eNables customers to fiNd the aNalytical tools they Need to solve problems amid aN explosioN of iNformatioN.by harrisoN doNNelly, iGf editor


“IDEAS is a platform that allows data providers, many of which work with geospatial data, to collaborate in a dedicated and secure market space with app developers, and ultimately with customers or users who need to sort through vast amounts of data to solve a problem,” Matlick explained. “Through that mechanism, the customer can find tools, methodologies and approaches that can help in a way that may be unique to them, but has applicability across multiple customer sets, markets and a much broader environment. So it’s cost-effective, and they can benefit from prior experiences and lessons learned.”

iNteGratioN skills

The platform includes a suite of COTS, open-source and in-house developed capabilities that take advantage of the analyt-ical and complex integration skill sets of the company, which began more than 40 years ago as a unit of GE Aerospace, then Lockheed Martin.

“We took all of that knowledge and insight and applied it to IDEAS, and set up a market space environment that allows our customers to get information and solve problems much more quickly,” Matlick continued. “The capability is available through a browser, so you don’t have to have a client on your own desktop or mobile device. We’re using a federated cloud, which allows for maximal scalability. You can get access to it from anywhere. It’s based on open standards, such as those of the Open Geospatial Consortium.”

A key advantage of IDEAS is that it is an environment where the customer doesn’t have to know the developer, but only have a problem or question, Matlick explained. “One of the interfaces in this application allows the customer to ask a question, and as you ask the question, it will search through all of the existing appli-cations online to see if any will solve your question or problem. If so, it then presents the results that answer your questions. If that doesn’t solve the problem right off, it allows sourcing of applica-tion developers to solve that problem.”

While many of the intelligence-related uses of this capability are sensitive, Matlick pointed to the example of a project carried out with the University of California at Davis, which developed a satellite-based index to predict crop yields in rural Tanzania as part of a program to offer crop insurance to small rice farmers.

“Part of the benefit of IDEAS is that something developed for Tanzania can be used in other geographic areas, which is the benefit of this kind of sharing environment,” he said. “In this project, we focused on issues such as poverty dynamics, world insurance markets and land tenure patterns, and produced a sat-ellite-based index that could predict rice and sunflower yields and plot them on a map.

“It takes a lot of insight to be able to go through the mathe-matical and statistical analysis, figure out what is important and sort through all the data, and then display it in a way that our customers can use. IDEAS simplifies this complexity, allowing the user to focus on what’s important,” Matlick added.

biG data process

The IDEAS platform fits within Vencore’s broader approach to big data predictive analytics, which involves a process applied to a wide range of customer needs. “It’s a four-phased approach,

where input such as social media, open-source or classified infor-mation will go through a filtering process to reduce the data and infuse it. Then we have an advanced analytics process, followed by an information visualization process, which primarily results in a dashboard that can display information,” Matlick said.

One example of the wide applicability of this approach came in June, when the company announced that its health analytics team had combined clinical knowledge and advanced analytic techniques to examine patient records to detect those who may be suffering from yet-undiagnosed cases of some of the 7,000 rare diseases identified by medical science.

“If we can find bad people in the world, we can also find rare diseases,” Matlick observed. “The medical industry is struggling with ways to go through massive quantities of data to determine who might have a disease that is being misdiagnosed or not diag-nosed, in a situation where they could be treated better. We use a lot of higher-order mathematics to go through and predict who might have these rare diseases.”

In the geospatial intelligence field, a lot of current interest is focused on techniques such as activity-based intelligence (ABI) and object-based production (OBP), which help discover the intel-ligence “unknown unknowns” and determine action-oriented approaches based on them.

“ABI is a methodology to acquire intelligence in a structured manner based on an entity’s observable actions,” he explained. “You can establish relationships between those entities by ana-lyzing where they are and how they get supplied. Then you can plot that information on a map and discover new information. OBP labels every object with its inherent relationships and func-tions, and those objects persist and are maintained as you per-form your analysis.”

But although the IDEAS platform offers a series of applica-tions, every one of which is a little different, an important part of its ultimate value may be in the fact that what may work in one environment may work for a similar situation in another area.

“The IDEAS platform now has about 100 applications across multiple needs,” Matlick said. “One application related to fire-fighting uses open-source information on weather, particularly wind information, and data on fires, and predicts where the fire is going to go. It’s a predictive analysis construct. If you’re a res-cue operation or responding to an oil field fire, you can use this information to decide where the fire is going and how to defend against it.”

While Vencore’s 40 years of experience in systems engineer-ing remain its core strength, he suggested, the company is mak-ing a major effort to support the IDEAS platform, meeting with hundreds of developers and academics to explore their capabili-ties and provide a marketplace for them.

“As this evolves, the client base will grow, as will the appli-cability,” Matlick said. “As the explosion of data continues, these types of offerings are going to be required. You’re not going to have enough analysts out in the field to exploit this the way it needs to be exploited to protect the nation.” O




As the world of social media continues to grow and morph into a dazzling array of new formats and capabilities, the U.S. intelligence community is looking for new ways to take advan-tage of this seemingly inexhaustible but unmanageable well-spring of open-source information.

Although open-source intelligence (OSINT), which also includes media and other public information, has long been recognized as an important way to gain intelligence insights, that understanding was galvanized by the Arab Spring of 2011, which showed how Web postings by people in the Middle East could help analysts predict and track the tumultuous events of that year.

iNdustry has developed New tools to miNe the rich veiN of iNformatioN offered by social media aNd other opeN sources.

by harrisoN doNNelly, iGf editor


The problem for the IC, of course, has been that the amount of data generated by hundreds of millions of people—which must be monitored both for the open declarations of terror-ists and other adversaries, as well as for legitimate but poten-tially explosive shifts of public opinion in countries around the world—would take an army of analysts. Moreover, the social media universe itself is constantly in flux, with sites opening and withering away rapidly due to changes in technology and consumer preference.

In response, both government and industry have pursued a number of approaches to making more effective use of social media information. Companies have developed a wide range of technology to automatically collect, screen, analyze, validate and identify the location of origin of open-source data.

If the technological approaches to open-source intelligence vary, however, there is a consensus on its importance.

“OSINT has a role in every phase of the intelligence cycle; it can tip the customer off to a new collection requirement and be used to corroborate, de-conflict and re-construct informa-tion from other domains. With the increasing use of mobile devices and social media, much of the focus has been on monitoring open-source data for situational awareness. It is often the first indicator that an event of significance has occurred, and the only source of information in denied areas,” noted Eileen Ratzer, program manager for the Advanced Analytics Lab at BAE Systems.

“OSINT analysis has always been an important, though sometimes underappreciated, discipline. Technology enables us to collect and manipulate open-source data information in ways we never could before. Having a team of analysts who can efficiently fil-ter, monitor and analyze open-source information means broader and deeper understanding on a global scale. OSINT can easily be shared with other stakeholders. If properly formatted, it can be easily integrated into any number of all-source workflows,” added Dan London, a sales, marketing and customer support executive for the company.

“Open-source intelligence is important because it is inspired from the world at large—a wider contribution base brings faster solutions and more data that can be shared quickly and easily,” said Shawn Masters, vice president of solution engineering for Novetta. “It is readily available and continuously improved by countless developers. Open-source intelligence offers the right technology to increase information and data to support decision-making and deal with increased risk.”

osiNt tradecraft

While BAE Systems has long supported the national secu-rity community with regional expertise and all-source analysis, it decided about three years ago to create an environment that allowed some of these experts to focus on developing new OSINT tradecraft that could be exported to the workforce, and utilized as part of an analysis-as-a-service delivery model.

“Our capabilities include a nuanced understanding of the open-source domain and social media landscape; tools for

automating the collection of unique unstructured data sources; algorithms that enable our tools to not only digest but interpret data as an analyst would; rigorous research and analysis of secu-rity issues; and clear and concise intelligence reporting,” said Ratzer, adding that the in-house tools are focused on accelerating an analyst’s workflow by automating low-cognitive tasks, reliev-ing them of tedious data entry and enabling them to spend more time performing actual analysis work.

The company’s Advanced Analytics Lab in McLean, Va., brings together intelligence analysts, data scientists, program-mers and IT architects. This multidisciplinary team supports a portfolio of offerings, from custom data feeds to special event coverage to regular delivery of finished intelligence reporting. “The ability to perform this work is underpinned by some in-house tools we’ve built to automate collection and processing of unstructured Web data, and the experience to select and oper-ate the right COTS tools for the job in a cost-efficient manner,” Ratzer explained.

Geo-enabled OSINT, which uses GIS techniques to analyze the location of social media activity, is in high demand across the national security commu-nity, she noted. But assigning geospatial proper-ties to user-generated content in the open-source domain can be a challenge, such as a comment posted anonymously on a Q&A forum or informa-tion leaked on a paste site using an alias.

“Recently, we’ve been applying an object-based production framework to the OSINT we collect, which will enhance our ability to interpret the OSINT that we are able to geo-locate in greater context when it is integrated into a multi-INT envi-

ronment,” Ratzer said.

fusioN aNalysis

The CACI-developed Open Source Exploitation Environment (OSEE) delivers a new suite of analytic tools to produce more powerful intelligence, enabling customers to better antici-pate events and act before they occur. “We leverage unique

industry and academic partnerships to support multi-INT fusion analysis, open-source harvest-ing, volunteered geospatial information and the ability to visualize data from thousands of data-sets in order to deliver more impactful actionable information,” said Jason Rowe, CACI geospatial project manager.

The OSEE solution offers a central cloud-based platform that provides analysts with tools to communicate and collaborate on projects. “By leveraging open-source data and working in an unclassified setting, CACI can provide baseline

intelligence for problems or areas that may otherwise receive lower priority or are possibly not looked at all,” said Rowe, add-ing that the system also provides the ability to leverage analysts at multiple locations to support surge and crisis situations.

Although quality and consistency in open-source data have always been a huge challenge, familiarity with a source is often the best avenue for addressing the strengths and limitations of a dataset, Rowe observed. “In many situations, leveraging the

Jason Rowe

Eileen Ratzer


crowd can help solve some of these issues. This significantly reduces the amount of validation that needs to be completed. Another benefit of the crowd is the sheer size and ability to focus collection and updates. This army of armchair analysts can often complete in a single day what would take an existing team of ana-lysts months to complete.”

Open-source intelligence will never replace the tradecraft and exquisite assets available to today’s intelligence professionals, Rowe acknowledged. “It will, however, provide another valuable tool in providing richer and broader context, and if done correctly in partnership with those exquisite assets, provide an improved ability to answer intelligence questions.”

Novetta focuses on delivering critical big data capabilities to organizations that don’t have a big budget or large teams of data scientists at their disposal.

In including open-source information in data to be analyzed, one of the biggest challenges is the fact that it is in multiple lan-guages. Having the capability to work across different languages, Masters said, Novetta software is language-agnostic, converting large amounts of multilingual data into actionable insights both quantitative and qualitative.

How you present information to the customer is another hid-den challenge, he continued. “Novetta presents information in a way that is going to be readily understood and absorbed by com-partmentalized bureaucracies where not everyone is an expert. Novetta has invested its resources to easily display data to its cus-tomers via a custom dashboard/console.”

Reliability is another core issue, since the proliferation of dif-ferent data sources only adds to the challenge of assessing the dependability of sources. “Thousands and thousands of options are out there and it can be hard to tell what is a good source or a bad source,” Masters observed. “Selection and confirmation bias deepen this issue. Analysts sometimes lean in to find a source that defends the argument they are trying to make. There needs to be a way to vet the volume. Novetta uses an enrichment pro-cess; offering quality control and assurance is significant piece of our platform. We automate where we can, but put human resources into the integrity and reliability of the information.”

From an operational point of view, Novetta began its open source initiative with an approach based on using a statistical, chart-based methodology to ana-lyze trends. It then evolved into dynamic map-ping, tracking patterns tactically and eventually added geospatial layers to create a contextual back-drop. This was transformative in the value of open-source data, Masters said.

data validatioN

Radiance Technologies, whose intelligence cus-tomers include organizations housed at the Stennis Space Center, Miss., has also had to grapple with the issue of val-idating data, noted Daniel J. Anderson, director of Stennis busi-ness operations. “One of the things we’re always asked when we do a briefing is how we could quantify the value of or validate information we might find. We wrestle with those questions, too,” Anderson said. “One theory is that the more a piece of infor-mation is reported, the more validation you can attribute to it—the crowdsourcing theory. Then there are reputable sources.

But do you trust CNN more than a Twitter user or a non-main-stream publication more than an observer on the ground? In the IC, if you are using open source, you have to wrestle with these questions as well.”

Another critical issue involves the location of those posting on social media, which is one of the types of information almost all customers are interested in. The problem, however, is that at least until recently, most items have not included “geotags” or location metadata.

“So our focus was on how to resolve location when that com-ponent is unavailable and there is no metadata,” Anderson said. “Can you use a machine to read text to identify locations within that text and resolve them in an automated fashion? That’s a capability that we have built into some of the systems we have developed. It’s what they call named entity extraction.

“It can be difficult because I may be sitting in my office in Mississippi, but talking about a meal I had in Chicago last week,” he continued. “Can I resolve the name Chicago in the tweet or post, and can I resolve the name of the restaurant mentioned down to a place? Also, can I take the names of other people mentioned in that post and associate them all with this loca-tion, or perhaps a particular time? Can I put all these entities together in a meaningful way? It’s an automated process that also creates intelligence.”

For an example of the value of location analysis of social media, Anderson pointed to a customer that oversees force pro-tection at military installations both domestically and abroad.

“From a statistical approach, you have to baseline how many people in the area of an installation use social media, or how many talk about this location in social media in a given time period. If that baseline changes, is that something you would want to be alerted about? All of a sudden, there is a spike in traf-fic talking about a consulate or base in some country. If I’m in charge of security, I want to know why that statistical norm has changed. That serves as a means of drawing your attention to look closer at all the traffic,” he said.

The future of this type of analysis is uncertain, Anderson said, because the open-source field changes so rapidly. “Facebook and Twitter seem ubiquitous today, but they are less than a decade

old. They have gained huge popularity, but recent trends show movement to other social media sites. You want to have a good understanding of the most popular sources of intelligence, but you can’t neglect things that are less popular, because there might be critical information there.

“There are many different types of things that can be collected, so you have to cover everything if you want to have collective situational awareness,” he said. “But it’s hard to say because the technol-ogy and demographics change so rapidly that we don’t know what will be most popular in five years.

There are parts of the software components that we developed that become obsolete within months.” O



Daniel J. Anderson


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Release Enhances Big-Data PlatformHP has announced the release of a

new version of HP Vertica, code-named “Excavator,” enhancing its open and scal-able Haven big-data platform. This latest version of HP Vertica enables organiza-tions to quickly ingest and analyze high-speed streaming data from various sources, including Internet of Things applications, and provides enhanced SQL analytics and

performance to Hadoop. Integrated with Apache Kafka, a distributed messaging system for data streaming, HP Excavator will allow organizations to analyze these volumes of data in real time. In addition, organizations will now be able to simplify and automate data load-and-query func-tionality, enabling them to empower any application with real-time analytics.

BlackBridge, a provider of satellite imagery and geospatial solutions, has entered into a definitive agreement for Planet Labs to acquire the RapidEye suite of core offerings. Planet Labs is a provider of a dataset of satellite imagery that designs, builds and operates a fleet of Earth imaging satellites. This is the next step toward achieving BlackBridge’s mission to explore the Earth to empower decisions, which aligns perfectly with Planet Labs’ mission. For years, BlackBridge has served customers across a broad range of domains, but has fundamentally focused on agriculture, energy and infrastruc-ture, consumer mapping, government, business intelligence, environmental and social impact. The result of this union with Planet Labs is expected to increase the value BlackBridge provides to existing customers and provide the means to expand into new domains. The company is expected to operate largely as it does today.

FMV Solution Supports Popular UAV Video CaptureRemote GeoSystems, a provider of geospatial full-motion video (FMV)

solutions, has announced direct support in all LineVision cloud, server and desktop applications for the world’s most popular UAV for HD and UltraHD video capture. This new LineVision capability immediately offers DJI Inspire 1 operators and pilots the ability to create and deliver interactive professional-grade video inspection and survey work products using some of the world’s most ubiquitous GIS and CAD software. DJI Inspire 1 users just need to enable .SRT file logging while recording video during flight. Post-flight, LineVision will allow you to load or upload the video and GPS track to a map. As the video plays, a cursor moves along the GPS track on the map, constantly indicating where and when the current video view was captured based on GPS data logged during the mission. Users can geographically navigate the video recordings by simply clicking any of the points along the GPS track on a map.

Jeff Dahlke; [email protected]

DigitalGlobe has announced a new product focused on the growing community of location-aware application developers. DigitalGlobe Maps API is a simple, cost-effective, subscription service for embedding satellite imagery, maps and other geospatial content into mobile and Web apps. Geospatial information is now a key feature of many consumer apps and powers a wide range of business intelligence tools. DigitalGlobe satel-lite imagery is already an essential part of the most popular online mapping services, and now the company has an offering to serve the community of consumer and business devel-opers who have not leveraged DigitalGlobe content in the past. DigitalGlobe Maps API enables developers to enhance their applica-tions with accurate, current, high-resolution satellite imagery and detailed map layers.

Planet Labs Acquires Satellite Imagery

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The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has awarded an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ), multiple-award contract to 25 large businesses and 25 small businesses to support information technology requirements across the defense intelligence enterprise and the greater intelligence community. The Enhanced Solutions for the Information Technology Enterprise (E-SITE) contract vehicle has the potential to reach a combined ceiling of up to $6 billion. The E-SITE contract is the second in a series of DIA IT enterprise IDIQ vehicles, and is a follow-on and expansion of the Solutions for Information Technology Enterprise IDIQ contract that expired in May. The E-SITE contract is designed to enable streamlined execution to make the agency’s overall IT acquisition processes more efficient. The large businesses selected were American Systems; BAE Systems; Blue Canopy; Boeing; Booz Allen Hamilton; CACI; CGI Federal; Computer Sciences Corp.;D&S Consultants; EIS; General Dynamics Information Technology; HP Enterprise Services; IBM; Intelligent Decisions; K Force Government Solutions; L-3 National Security Solutions; Leidos; Lockheed Martin; ManTech/WINS; Northrop Grumman; Pragmatics; Raytheon IIS Group; Scientific Research Corp.; Sotera; and SRA International.

Compiled by KMI Media Group staff

Airbus Defence and Space has introduced Data Management Solutions (DMS), an integrated suite of products and services that provides an easy way for clients to access, manage and disseminate various types of geospatial data. Hosted in the cloud or on premises, DMS includes fully managed solutions that eliminate the problems traditionally associated with managing large volumes of different types of geospatial data archived and accessed in multiple locations. DMS is designed to handle raster imagery, GIS vector layers, digital eleva-tion models, LiDAR point clouds, contour maps and asset monitoring information in virtually any format. The Data Management Solutions suite includes four offer-ings: data management portals, which provide single-point access to all of a customer’s geospatial data and easily integrate into existing workflows; fully custom-ized solutions, which combine the Airbus Defence and Space Geo-Intelligence portfolio with best-in-class open-source modules; streaming services, which give clients instant access to their own data and/or the full line of Airbus Defence and Space geospatial products; and data management systems, which include three Airbus Defence and Space hardware/software packages that can be installed behind the client’s firewall onsite or on mobile devices.

Aerial imagery and visual analytics company nearmap andEsri have announced plans to enable customers to obtain high-resolution imagery for usewith Esri’s suite of software. ThroughtheEsriArcGISMarketplace,userswillbeable to instantlyaccessup-to-dateimagerycapturedatbetterthan2.8inchGSD.Inaddi-tion,anearmapadd-inforArcGISgivesEsriuserstheflexibilitytoaccesscurrentorhistoricimagery,armingbusinesseswithpowerfulinformation to make informed planning and prospecting deci-sions.Nearmap’sinnovativehardwareandsoftwaresolutionshavetransformedhundredsof industries including solar, construction,insurance,transportationandgovernment.Thecompanyexpandedto encompassU.S. urban areas inOctober 2014, and alreadyhascapturedmorethan50percentof theU.S.population. Imagery isupdatedataminimumofthreetimesperyearforallcaptureareasandasmuchassixtimesyearlyinmajorurbanareas.

Jennifer Lauricella; [email protected]

High-Resolution Imagery Available for Esri Customers

http://media.dma.mil/2015/Aug/04/2001266685/-1/-1/0/150723-F-WU210-020.JPG[8/25/2015 2:41:32 PM]

An MQ-1B Predator sensor operator with the 18th Reconnaissance Squadron flies a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) training sortie in support of Red Flag 15-3 at Creech AFB, Nev. The goal of participating in this year’s annual exercise was to fully integrate RPAs into large force exercises and to educate major weapon systems communities on RPA capabilities.

DIA Selects 50 for Enhanced IT Solutions Contract

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Lieutenant General Robert P. “Bob” Otto is the deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, Headquarters U.S. Air Force. He is responsible to the secretary and chief of staff of the Air Force for policy formulation, planning, evaluation, over-sight and leadership of Air Force ISR capabilities. As the Air Force’s senior intelligence officer, he is directly responsible to the director of national intelligence and the under secretary of defense for intelli-gence. He leads five directorates and supports a 30,000-person enter-prise with a portfolio valued at $55 billion across the Air Force.

Otto was commissioned in 1982 after graduating from the Air Force Academy. He has served as a squadron, group, wing and agency commander. His staff duties include three tours at Headquarters U.S. Air Force, one tour with the Operations Directorate on the Joint Staff and one tour at Headquarters, Air Education and Training Command. Prior to his current assignment, he was the commander, Air Force ISR Agency, Lackland AFB, Texas.

Otto is a command pilot with more than 2,800 hours in the U-2, RQ-4, F-15, AT-38, T-38, O-2 and OT-37. In 2011, he deployed as the Air Forces Central Command Combined Air Operations Center director, overseeing Air Force operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Southwest Asia.

Q. You’ve mentioned in other venues the need to revolutionize analytics. What does that entail, and how will it affect the ISR enterprise as a whole?

A: We had a robust discussion about the fact that we know we need to do work in analytics. But does it amount to a revolution? We started off with a survey of our people, especially commanders, and what we came to realize was that there is a real gap between the skill sets that we think we will need to be successful in future wars, especially high-end wars, and what we are actually training and executing today. If you take the fact that 75 percent of our ISR airmen enlisted after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, you will understand that they have predominately dealt with counter-terrorism and counter-insur-gency. The skills sets that are needed to succeed in those areas can be very different from those needed to succeed in high-end fights and anti-access area denial (A2AD) situations.

The second factor is how technology is proliferating, and how much data are potentially available. Everyone talks about the era of big data, but what we are really saying is that there is a great deal of potential information out there, but historically, we have tended to focus on a very small percentage of it. Could we get some game-changers if we could access more information and use it in dif-ferent ways? When you harness that with the gravitation to cloud

environments, we start to see big data, cloud environments and high-end computing having the ability to really change the way we do business. Some of the efforts that we are pursuing include open architecture, widely shared tools and multi-domain analysis. We are putting all of that together and thinking through the direction the intelligence community is going, including the IC Information Technology Enterprise (IC ITE), as well as bringing in information for the Air Force from the three primary domains of space, air and cyberspace. You can also throw into that all publicly available infor-mation, which we call the terrestrial domain, and then think about multi-INT approaches, looking not just at geospatial, but also at geo-spatial informed by signals intelligence, along with social media, open source and human intelligence. All of that together, we believe, repre-sents a revolution in analytics.

Q: How much of a challenge will the changes in training be, or will it be something that a new generation of airmen will adapt to easily from having grown up with the technology?

A: I think the airmen will adapt very easily. The challenges will be in the bureaucracy and getting permissions or in our training develop-ment that might lag. The quality of the airmen we assess today, and their familiarity and comfort with technology, blows me away. When I watch airmen monitoring 16 to 20 chat screens in real time in a fight,

Lieutenant General Robert P. OttoDeputy Chief of Staff for ISR

U.S. Air Force

Analytic RevolutionaryTransforming ISR Through Big Data and the Cloud

Q&AQ&A


with the ability to figure out critical information and set up their own screening mechanisms for the data, I am extremely impressed. I don’t think the limit will be the airmen. But I do think we need to come up with training that can match their abilities and have technology and permissions that will allow them to access all the data they need.

Q. What’s the strategy to bring more automated tools to speed storage, fusion and retrieval of collected geospatial data?

A: We are progressing along several battle lines. First, we are pursuing an open architecture for our Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS), which provides globally networked, regionally focused immediate warfighter support. When that system becomes an open architecture, and we are more agnostic as to the hardware we apply to it and the sensors we need to integrate—because we can do that in days or weeks rather than years—it really starts to open up some pos-sibilities while also providing an opportunity to bend the cost curve. There is also data storage. We’re looking at how we can use cloudlike structures for data storage. We have to think of that more as a com-modity, and therefore invest fewer people in it, and it can become an opportunity for industry to meet a need.

We need to combine with the efforts in the IC so that we don’t both spend resources developing a common tool. Why not take a tool developed for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, for exam-ple, and possibly modify it by 5-10 percent for our use, or take it as it is? If you have an open architecture, you can do those kinds of modi-fications because you know the standard for which you need to build to fit into the architecture. Finally, we need to reach into the multi-domain. So we have an ongoing effort to discern the direction that commercial entities are going in space, where a lot of EO/IR sensors are being deployed and how we could bring that data into our ground stations. The same thing is true with cyber, which presents some more sensitive subjects in terms of database access. The point is that there are several lines of effort that will all come together to enable this revolution in analytics.

Q. What sort of partnering activities would you like to see between the intelligence community and industry to enable geospatial analysts in their mission? Also, do you think the open architecture systems that you are looking for will be affordable in the future?

A: I think we can do open architecture within the current budget we are spending on DGCS, and the savings that will result from it are so significant. It will be the gift that keeps on giving. In terms of reach-ing out to industry, we established a foothold in Silicon Valley, and we were planning to do that even before Secretary of Defense Carter gave his address to Stanford University and talked about partnering. We believe that there is a lot we can learn from industry in certain areas, such as what I call “new space”—there are the commercial entities that have access to space now that cheaper launch and microsatellites have come about. Another area is cyberspace, where many big com-panies have found tremendous advantages in mining data, grappling with big data and discerning what was important for their business. Private enterprise is really a leader in this space, and there is a lot we can learn from then. Finally, we are partnering and emphasizing Air Force participation in IC ITE and the Department of Defense’s Joint Information Environment. It will take good coordination between the various pieces to bring this all together. That’s a lot easier for me to say than it is to execute, however, so it definitely will be challenging.

Q. What’s the plan to prepare airmen for this revolution in analytics?

A: We have a formal process through which we change our train-ing approaches. There are some long lead times, however. For every-thing done on a large scale, we need to train the trainers and have an approved curriculum before we can run the airmen through that. However, we have already started the effort to make training more agile. At Goodfellow AFB, Texas, where we do our foundational intelligence training, they have proved remarkably agile in integrat-ing lessons learned from ongoing efforts in Afghanistan, and Iraq before that, so they can integrate some modest changes into a cur-riculum from one class to the next. We’re much more agile than we used to be.

Q. With all the areas the ISR enterprise touches, where does advancing technological initiatives for geospatial intelligence fall in your priorities?

A: We have five priorities: to rebalance and optimize our integrated ISR capabilities; normalize cyber ISR, space ISR and HUMINT; strengthen integration, collaboration and partnerships with other services, nations and ourselves; revolutionize analysis and exploita-tion; and deliver and care for our team of ISR airmen. We have a num-ber of technological initiatives that fall under those five priorities, but we don’t have a priority to advance technology, because technology

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should support broader priorities. We are moving toward IC ITE and working on a new ground station for the MQ 9. We are advancing the capabilities in the Global Hawk to enable it to be the backbone of our high-altitude ISR. We are transforming our approach to JWICS, the top-secret communications infrastructure upon which intelligence resides. As I have mentioned, we are attempting to access efforts from commercial entities in the space domain, and working on an open-architecture DCGS.

Q. How does full motion video (FMV) fit into geospatial intelligence?

A: It almost controls our day-to-day efforts. The Air Force provides 61 CAPs of FMV today, and it will be 60 in October. It has proven to be one of those things for which there is just insatiable demand, and there is also the issue of data storage. We often use FMV that has been stored, especially from Gorgon Stare, as we conduct a forensic examination after an explosion. FMV is very much inte-gral to the GEOINT that we work on. The piece that we haven’t grappled with is the notion of whether we are effective with it. Unfortunately, despite 14 years of war, we mostly track hours and sorties, and have not adopted robust measures of merit. We need to focus more on effectiveness.

Q. How is the Air Force adapting geospatial collections for contested environments against near-peer adversaries?

A: First of all, I believe that we need a new platform. When we talk about my first priority, which is to rebalance and optimize integrated ISR capabilities, it is really about whether, as a nation state, we are overinvested in permissive ISR and underinvested in the kind of ISR that allows us to address these near-peer, A2AD environments. We clearly need to be working toward a new platform that can operate in that environment. Secondly, we have low numbers of highly exqui-site national satellites, which I believe could be lucrative targets in a conflict with a near-peer adversary—both the satellites and ground stations. Diversifying our access to information from space seems like a prudent course of action, and one we are looking very closely at doing. We also need to think not only about the collection side in an A2AD environment, but also about decision making. We start to bring together command and control and ISR, because ISR is foun-dational to a commander trying to make decisions. What we need to do is to tighten the observe, orient, decide and act (OODA) loop. If we can create a tighter OODA loop and turn that into intelligence with the timing and tempo that the commander requires, we stand our best chances in those environments.

My vision for a new platform is something that can penetrate very complex integrated air defense systems—systems that are pushing platforms further and further out. What we need to be able to do is to characterize those systems and gather both signals and geospatial intelligence. Some of that you can do from space, but when space is threatened as well, you need the ability to get in closer. Essentially, that means we’re going to have to figure out how to do that from a stealth perspective.

Q. With the pending decision to divest the U-2 DRAGONLADY, how will airborne geospatial intelligence collection be affected?

A: The plan is to begin to retire the U-2 in FY 2019. The FY 2012 defense authorization law says we need equal or greater capability in

the Global Hawk, looked at holistically, before the U-2 is retired. The Air Force wants to invest in Global Hawk to make the sensors better, and we are looking specifically at advanced spectral sensors. We also looking at the optical bar camera that currently flies on the U-2, and discussing how to replace that capability on the U-2 on the Global Hawk or another platform.

What we need to do is achieve sensor parity by FY 2019. If we’re successful in doing that, and can convince Congress that it is the right thing to do holistically, then we’ll transition to the Global Hawk as our platform.

Q. The thirst for ISR seems to have no end; every combat commander wants a freshly collected geospatial product before a mission. How does the Air Force plan to meet the demand, and what are the challenges to doing so?

A: What we’ve proven is that constant surge cannot work. We prac-tically broke our medium-altitude RPA enterprise by constant surge. So we’re in a reset period that will take a couple of years to fix. We need to learn from that. We believe we’re going to be in these kinds of operations for a sustained period of time, and you just can’t treat people as if there’s an existential threat that requires a surge all the time. Eventually they get tired and want their own lives, and leave the service. We believe we have a plan now that would expect the Air Force to provide 60 CAPS of medium altitude FMV, look to the Army to eventually provide 16 CAPS. Then our surge force becomes these government-owned, contractor-operated CAPS of up to 10 CAPS. That’s 86 CAPs of capability just of drones. If you add the numerous manned platforms that the Air Force and Army have, that is a lot of capability. That is an approach, and then we have the National Guard and Reserves for short period surges. But in order for that to work, we have to have a discussion about CAP effectiveness. I believe that there is a point of diminishing returns, and if there is some scru-tiny on how we are using these CAPs and the best way to use them to achieve the combatant commander’s desired effects, then we can make progress without adding additional CAPs. What we need to do is to think through the analytics and get at effectiveness, rather than just saying we need more FMV.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?

A: We will succeed or fail based on the efforts and ingenuity of our airmen. So we cannot ignore the airmen in the equation. We have to continue to develop them and care for them, and let them know that this is something they can do over the long term. I am con-cerned at how hard we have been pushing our airmen. I have enlisted 1N0s (operations intelligence specialists), 1N1s (geospatial intelli-gence analysts), 1N4s (network intelligence analysts) and 14N intelli-gence officers who are all below the secretary of defense’s one-to-one deployment dwell red line. My 1N2s (signals intelligence analysts) and 1N3s (cryptologic language analysts) are at the secretary’s red line. I don’t believe we can expect them to continue to do this with-out some reset. What concerns me is that three things are coming together—an improved economy, high-op tempo and sequestration environment that continues to put pressure and demands on our air-men to do more with less. We’re at the point where we need the sup-port of the American people and Congress and to recognize that we have taken all the fat out of the system. If we’re going to continue to maintain these end-states, we need to be mindful of our airmen. O


Contractors have been and are an integral part of the intelligence community’s total workforce (which also includes federal employees and military personnel). Yet questions have been raised regarding how they are used and the size and cost of the contractor component. Of particular interest are core contract personnel, who provide direct technical, managerial and administrative support to agency staff. Examples of these types of support are collection and operations, analysis and production and enterprise information and technology. The use of core contract personnel enables the IC to meet its needs, which may involve obtaining unique expertise or surge support for a particular mission or augmenting insufficient in-house resources.

The IC has undertaken the following initiatives designed or used to track contractors or contractor employees:

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), through Intelligence Community Directive 612 (dated October 30, 2009), requires the IC elements to provide inventories of their core contract personnel to the Assistant Director of National Intelligence for Human Capital.

The Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2010 directs each IC component to provide estimates of the number and costs of core contract personnel for the upcoming fiscal year to ODNI. The same measure also contained a one-time requirement for the director of national intelligence to report on the IC’s use of personal services contracts.

While the initiatives themselves are unclassified, the information gathered, or produced, as a result of each initiative—e.g., an inven-tory of core contract personnel—may be classified. This list of ini-tiatives may not be comprehensive as the IC may engage in other, classified initiatives to assess its use of core contract personnel.

Contractors perform a variety of essential functions for the fed-eral government, including the IC, yet using contractors is not without risk. Questions raised by Congress and others involve the possibility that IC core contract personnel perform inherently gov-ernmental activities (which, generally, only federal employees are allowed to perform) or functions, and that the IC’s acquisition work-force does not have sufficient capacity to monitor contractor employ-ees who perform critical functions or functions closely associated with inherently governmental functions. IC components unable to properly oversee contractor employees run the risk of ceding control over their mission and operations to contractors.

iNtroductioN

A then-unknown employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, Edward Snowden, burst onto the national agenda in June 2013, when news articles included or referenced classified information he had obtained while working as a contractor employee for the National Security Agency.

Whereas interest in the IC’s use of contractors spiked with the Snowden revelations, and spawned policies and initiatives designed

to prevent, mitigate or recover from similar incidents, the IC’s reli-ance on the private sector is not a new phenomenon. Following the end of the Cold War, workforce drawdowns coupled with retirements and limits on hiring federal employees degraded the intelligence community’s capabilities, and the IC “was encouraged to ‘outsource’ as much as possible.” In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, ter-rorist attacks, the IC turned to contractors “to meet rapidly evolving mission demands.”

In 2008, the then-head of human capital in ODNI offered the fol-lowing assessment of the IC’s use of contractors: “The nature of con-tractors is such that you do have a great deal more flexibility. You can expand and contract more readily using contract personnel. So in any given day, week, month or year, that number may go up or down. Our objective is to stabilize our military and civilian workforce and then use contractors as appropriate to deal with temporary work surge, unique expertise, etc.”

Many experts believe the federal government’s reliance on con-tractors is necessary to accomplish its mission, and this is no less true for the IC. Using contractors is not without risk, however. Depending on the circumstances, an agency could unknowingly or unintentionally cede the performance of, or control over, certain agency functions to contractors.

coNclusioN

Similar to the rest of the federal government, the IC has relied on contractors for many years to perform a variety of functions. Core contractor employees, in particular, are an essential component of the IC’s workforce, providing skills and expertise, bolstering the in-house workforce, providing support services, and accomplishing short-term programs or projects.

Using contractors is not without risk, however. The challenge for the IC leadership is to monitor contractors and the work their employees do, ensure contractor personnel are not performing inher-ently governmental work (unless circumstances permit them to do so), track contractor performance of closely associated functions, and retain control over its mission and operations when contractor per-sonnel perform critical functions.

A related challenge for the IC is to maintain an acquisition work-force that has the capacity, in terms of size, expertise and training, to oversee the many contractors and contractor employees perform-ing work for the intelligence community.

The challenge for Congress and other interested parties that exer-cise, or would like to exercise, oversight over the IC is the nature of the community’s work and activities. O

Overseeing IC Contractors



(Editor’s Note: Following are edited excerpts from a Congressional Research Service report entitled “The Intelligence Community and Its Use of Contractors: Congressional Oversight Issues,” which was issued in August 2015 and made publicly available by the Federation of American Scientists.)


Some people incorrectly compare mission planning to flight planning as a static event in time. In aviation, a pilot files a plan and then takes to the air according to the plan, barring extraordinary circumstances.

But military mission planning is much more compli-cated and dynamic. Since, as the saying goes, no plan sur-vives the first contact with the enemy, it’s not the plan that counts but the planning, which must be a continuing and ongoing process.

Such was the case even before military organiza-tions had access to the highly advanced capabilities avail-able today. The presence of technology not only makes the possibility of mission planning much more fluid and pre-cise, but also raises the expectations of the mission planning process, which in turn challenges the technologies to perform that much better and in real time.

Geospatial intelligence and mission plan-ning are inextricably linked. GEOINT is used to develop targets, plan ingress and egress routes, identify helicopter landing zones and in many other aspects of a mission. What modern technology brings to the table is the ability to continuously refresh the geo-spatial data in real time or close to it and combine GEOINT with other forms of intelli-gence, so that the planning process can react to events on the ground.

“Mission planning is really a constant process of re-planning,” said Jon Damusch, president and CEO of 2d3 Sensing. “Re-planning requires refreshed data. It’s not a question of having data available just at a single point in time. It needs to be available in real time, and it needs to become part of the workflow in such a way that the user doesn’t have to seek the data. But there are some chal-lenges to making that vision a reality.”

“Mission planning needs to occur iteratively,” said Gary Raven, director of programs and operations at Textron’s Advanced Information Solutions business. “This requires incorporating updates while executing the mission. Updates need to be disseminated through to the edge so that they

can be acted upon immediately. The idea is to have a real-time feedback loop that allows plans to be changed dynamically.”

Geospatial intelligence has always been part of mission planning. “Commanders, operators and agencies all want to know what is going on in areas where we they don’t have ready access,” noted John Ploschnitznig, director of modeling application development at Riverside Research. “We have to find those things and reference them to where they are precisely on Earth. It has been the same for decades. The United States discovered Soviet

missiles being installed in Cuba in the early 1960s thanks to imagery and GEOINT.”

GeoiNt is a key part of the flow of iNformatioN leaders Need to revise plaNs iN respoNse to chaNGiNG coNditioNs.

by peter buxbaum

iGf correspoNdeNt

Real-Time Mission Planning

John Ploschnitznig


“GEOINT is critical to any mission planning,” added Ric Diaz, sales operations director at Textron’s Geospatial Solutions busi-ness. “For combat missions, it is used to develop targets and iden-tify critical elements in a facility that needs to be taken out. It is also part of the decision on which weapons to drop on a target and the precise location where they should be dropped to neutral-ize an installation. For humanitarian and disaster relief missions, you need imagery to evaluate the situation on the ground and to make determinations on how to get the relief forces in.”

chaNGe detectioN

The analysis of GEOINT can be used to determine the base-line of normalcy in a given location or with an object of inter-est. When there are changes to that normal situation, GEOINT and other disciplines can provide a warning that something has changed and that a response may be in order.

If a mission is decided upon, GEOINT helps to identify where the mission needs to take place and how forces are going to get in and out safely. “Analysts look at baselines and compare new infor-mation that has effected the baseline to support mission planning,” said Rob Zitz, senior vice pres-ident and chief systems architect at Leidos. “This data is collected and, once integrated with other sources of data, analysts can do change detection and then serve up that intelligence in a way that is user-friendly.”

The more sophisticated systems will look at data at the pixel level and then ingest them into the architec-ture in real time. The few pixels that contain intelligence will be separated out from those that don’t. “Change detection sys-tems can provide automatic alerts to operators and analysts,” said Zitz. “Change detection reduces the amount of data collected to the essential bits of information that analysts will want to move on.”

Users of geospatial data are increasingly demanding real-time information flows. “Some talk about big data, but what we really need is fast data,” said Zitz. “Analysts are already swimming in data, but logic dictates it should go to unclassified sources as well. End-users of GEOINT know it is important, but that it is even more powerful when integrated with other intelligence.”

Part of the problem in establishing real-time data flows is in assigning priorities to the collection of data. Despite the proliferation of sensors, the demand for collection has also grown, requiring a separate system to establish a rules-based collection order.

“Thousands of people generate demands for collection,” explained Ploschnitznig. “Sensors may be able to perform 5,000 collections a day, but there may be 20,000 requests. Many of these are very specific, such as getting a view of a specific target at a specific time of day with the sun in a certain position. The question is: who prioritizes what is most important? It is also important to consider weather conditions and geographic infor-mation in making collection decisions.”

Riverside Research has developed a tool in collaboration with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency that orders the data collection based upon whether the request is feasible. It deter-mines whether a view is even possible given the topography of

the area and whether a sensor is in position or can be put in posi-tion to gather the desired data, as well as the strategic priority of the request.

“The tool will tell you whether the requested data can be gathered and by which systems,” said Ploschnitznig. “It will also determine whether a certain target can be seen from a cer-tain area and the risk to a platform to position it to perform the requested gathering of data.”

In order to make that happen, the Riverside system needs information on the entire constellation of sensors, from their location to the capabilities and constraints. “All those factors go into modeling the sensor,” said Ploschnitznig. “If collections are ranked high enough on the priority list, they are officially booked. With this tool, users can get immediate confirmation if something is achievable. That way, we can get the right data with the right accuracy and sensitivity and pass that along to the ana-lyst. The nice part is that the system acts completely objectively.

The rules apply to everyone.”Another complex technical issue relating to the

use of GEOINT for mission planning has to do with the different sensors and the data formats they employ. “Much of the data is captured overhead in the form of imagery, full-motion video, wide-area motion imagery and LiDAR,” said Raven. “Much of this information is extremely dense and includes huge amounts of data that need to be processed by machine to be used for mission planning.”

“Another challenge is interoperability,” added Diaz. “The United States doesn’t do anything uni-

laterally anymore. We need to interoperate with coalition ser-vices. It is still a technical challenge to talk to those systems.”

The solution to these problems is the continuing develop-ment of data standards that would allow geospatial data to be seamlessly integrated with mission planning and other systems, Damusch said. “It is ironic that in consumer markets there are better tools to access data than in government markets. That is because the drive for the consumption of data in commercial markets has forced data providers to settle on ubiquitous stan-dards for sharing data.”

The same trend has been hard to establish in the gov-ernment space because of traditional procurement practices. “Procurement led to stovepipe approaches in many cases that extend to the data itself,” said Damusch. “The focus on data is part of the challenge. If data is not in standard formats, its accessibility through a wider range of mission-planning systems becomes problematic. We would like to have a single coherent view of the world to plan a mission. Data contained in stovepipes makes access challenging.”

Organizations such as the Open Geospatial Consortium are attempting to define data standards that can be used across data collections. “The success in adopting standards is critical to pro-viding more ubiquitous access to geo-temporal data for mission planners and other customers,” said Damusch. “Democratizing data would allow everyone access through a Web browser.”

4-d display

Textron has developed a system that pulls data from a variety of sources into a common four-dimensional display to perform

Rob Zitz


mission planning. Textron’s approach is to build middleware that manages diverse data formats in common and disseminates it using common protocols.

“One key aspect of the solution is highly configurable fil-tering capabilities so that an analyst can pare data down to his [or her] area of operations,” said Raven. “That way the sys-tem brings down only what is relevant for the analyst. It plays into the idea of a common operating picture. We just filter down the data to those elements that are needed for the analyst’s own planning.”

Another data problem involves enabling interfaces so that analysts can add context to incoming data in the form of tagging. “Humans are great at parsing and reducing concepts to a simple phrase to describe what is happening,” said Damusch. “Systems should allow humans to add information in order to provide con-text to the raw data.”

2d3’s Catalina product captures data from a variety of sources and feeds software that powers ground control stations for the Insitu family of vehicles that are designed to operate as unmanned air vehicles with autopilot.

Catalina connects to and ingests data from a wide vari-ety and large quantity of sources. It improves both the imagery and metadata, indexes the data for easy discovery and dissem-inates in just about any format all in a standards-compliant manner. Catalina uses a wide range of media formats and stan-dards to collect the pertinent information in any source, accu-rately store and index those data and make them available for easy query.

Catalina has the capability to extract, improve, edit or delete information contained in media and metadata, ensur-ing that the data products from a system contain the best infor-mation possible. A single version can easily handle dozens of simultaneous feeds and operations, and additional Catalina instances can be deployed to support collocated scaling or distributed operations.

“We built a system with data and metadata coming off the platform that is indexed, sorted and normalized to standards,” said Damusch. “The data is accessible through an open interface so that anyone can write a query and get access to data, assuming they have a path of connectivity.”

Textron’s iCommand product brings in all disparate feeds from existing Department of Defense programs of record into a com-mon operating picture so that iterative mission planning and tasking can be accomplished from a single interface. A three-component suite harnesses real-time data fusion to provide syn-chronized command and control across manned and unmanned systems, creating an operational picture for decision-makers, ana-lysts and operators.

“One of the critical elements is not only getting the informa-tion to decision-makers, but also the last tactical mile,” said Diaz. “Engagement forces have to be aware what is behind the next wall or the next hill. We are developing systems to provide GEOINT on tablets, smartphones and other handheld devices.”

Warfighters often find themselves in situations where they lack network connectivity. “In that case, handheld devices can be loaded with baseline images,” said Diaz. “Forces don’t always need the best and latest image available. They need a baseline that can be updated and where they replicate any activity on that image.”

tactical Gateway

Leidos has built on its Real-Time Regional Gateway (RT-RG) to develop eXpeditionaryRT (XRT) to bring real-time intelligence to the tactical environment. RT-RG is an intelligence platform that provides near-real-time intelligence to tactical and strategic users throughout the world.

The original RT-RG enabled intelligence analysts to act on intelligence in near-real time, increasing the volume and variety of data processed. “XRT is a ruggedized, transportable RT-RG,” said Zitz. “XRT supports tactical missions that are mobile and disconnected from the traditional intelligence enterprise. XRT pushes critical capabilities to tactical edge nodes, enabling an increased set of users with a greater set of mission focus areas. It also provides users with the capability to ingest data from local collection assets and conduct analysis onsite in real time.”

Leidos has also worked with NGA on the Advanced GEOINT Framework (AGF), which brings classified and unclassified 2-D and 3-D imagery to users over a thin client using cloud-based technology.

“AGF provides an open-architecture, Web-services approach to integrating massive amounts of structured and unstructured information from all INTs and open sources, and arraying the data in a user-friendly GEOINT analytical framework for analy-sis,” said Zitz. “AGF is scalable and provides a low-risk, lower-cost means to integrate stovepiped databases and systems. End-users can be anywhere on the planet and can touch NGA. They can use AGF to use and manipulate data from anywhere.”

Future developments in mission planning will include the continued breaking down of data siloes, which will allow mission planning systems to optimize their operations. “Machine learn-ing and statistic and probabilistic analysis will allow systems to provide optimal mission plans,” said Raven. “With modeling, sim-ulation and knowledge-based reasoning, systems will be able to look at various alternatives to determine which one is optimal in terms of threats and vulnerabilities.”

Management of logistics chains will benefit from this tech-nology, Raven suggested. Computers will evaluate thousands of courses of action to suggest optimal force compositions and asset placements in a process that today is highly manual.

“As we move ahead in the next three to five years, we will see a significant movement toward persistent surveillance,” said Zitz. “Part of that will be in the classified arena, but more will be in the emergence of small satellites, which will enable analysts to look at points all over the Earth more regularly than in the past. This will involve the collection of more data and will also enable better change detection.”

“We see more mobile devices coming into play with acces-sibility to systems to people who aren’t trained as mission plan-ners,” said Damusch. “Mission planning will evolve for that kind of user. The relationship may bypass the mission planner entirely. The end-user will rely on a system with access to all data types that can perform mission planning automatically.” O




When discussing the challenges posed by big data, analysts speak of the four Vs—volume, variety, velocity and veracity. Geospatial intelligence is the ultimate big-data scenario where all of these issues are confronted, with huge volumes of data coming off numerous platforms and sensors, high-streaming rates combined with rapid data aging and homogenization of data sets with different formats, structures and quality. All of this culminates in the chal-lenge of making quick decisions on the fitness of data to gain value for effective decision making.

as data streams iN, New techNoloGy aNd tradecraft are Needed to exploit it iN support of rapid decisioN makiNG. by peter buxbaum

iGf correspoNdeNt

Geospatial’s Big Data Challenge


The nature of big data makes it impossible for analysts to make decisions about the utility of data independently. A high degree of automation is required to cull data most relevant to the task at hand and subject it to analytics.

The problem of the velocity of data is twofold. The first is the incoming speed of the data, making its timely capture a challenge. The second element is outgoing. Users of the data want to be able to exploit the data in support of decision mak-ing in real or near-real time. New technologies must be applied to make that happen, and changes in intelligence tradecraft are also needed.

The mainstays of big data processing, Hadoop and MapReduce, which use clusters of commodity servers to store data and man-age queries against them, are still useful when it comes to exploiting geospatial data at rest. But increasingly, geospatial data are being streamed in, and users want to be able to make use of these data streams on the fly. This is especially true in the case of social media feeds—which are often geo- and time-stamped and have proven to be a source of increasingly valuable intelligence—and other sources of unstructured data.

Also trending is the fusion of geospatial with other forms of data to create better context and produce more effective intelli-gence. Making all this happen requires a whole new set of tools and technologies. More than the application of technology, cul-tural changes within the intelligence community toward the deployment of technology will be required.

storaGe aNd orGaNizatioN

“The thing about big data is that we are not collecting it with the intent that much of it will trigger a human synapse,” said John Marion, president of Logos Technologies. “We collect it because we don’t know where something bad is going to happen. The ques-tion is how to quickly find the data analysts need and how to organize and store data and reduce the num-ber of people who need to deal with complex problems.”

“The difficult piece from an intelligence analysis point of view is identifying the patterns and con-nections at scale,” said Stephen Dalzell, senior product manager for the IBM i2 Intelligence Portfolio. “Fusing the multiple geo-spatial and temporal sources is challenging, as is finding the hid-den relationships between people and their links to places.”

The 2010 Haiti disaster was the first time intercontinen-tal data, including crowdsourced information, were integrated within a short time frame to achieve situational awareness, noted

Peter Baumann, professor of com-puter science at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. “Since then, technology has advanced signifi-cantly,” he added, “but we are far from leveraging the potential that all the diverse modern data sources offer.”

“Big data’s four Vs lead to prob-lems with the exploitation of intel-ligence data because they make it too difficult at times to discern meaningful signature patterns,” said Bob Palmer, senior director for solutions at SAP National Security Services (SAP NS2). “We find that multi-INT information is usu-ally being correlated by analysts after exploitation of each individ-ual INT. Technology must support the upstream exploitation of data. The goal is to help analysts resolve unknowns in order to further direct data collection.”

“For years, we were focused on applying technology platforms like Hadoop to our customers’ big data problems,” said Keith Johnson, technical director for analysis and mission solutions at Lockheed Martin. “Now the data has become more streaming-oriented, so we need to use other capabilities like Apache Spark and apply them to our customers’ problems, particu-larly around integrating data and

working with large, unstructured raster imagery and full-motion video data.”

One focus of Johnson’s work is the integration of geospatial data with other forms of data to create richer intelligence prod-ucts. “Integrating GEOINT with other data has the effect of mak-ing the primary GEOINT data more relevant,” he said. “Taking GEOINT and combining it with other data sources has the effect of creating geospatial data where it didn’t exist before.” This is especially true when analysts judge the credibility of the author of social media postings.

“Our goal is to get as many perspectives on a place in the world as possible,” said Tony Frazier, senior vice president for U.S. government solutions at DigitalGlobe. “In the GEOINT space, it is always the unknowns that analysts want to find out

Bob Palmer

Keith Johnson

John Marion

Peter Baumann


about, such as the likely location of a future terror attack or the location of people who are likely to be sympathetic to one side or the other. We are trying to leverage new, non-traditional sources of GEOINT to fill in intelligence gaps. Big data is essential to realize that vision.”

“The next phase where we will see innovation kicking in is in tra-decraft,” said Richard Cooke, vice president and general manager of the geospatial solutions group at Harris. “Automation allows us to plow through massive amounts of data, but intelligence analysts have issues with that. Analysts have to learn to trust that we are not tak-ing critical decisions out of their hands.”

Systems designed to tackle GEOINT big data problems are increasingly using Hadoop to mine and analyze these oceans of data to spot trends and to make better decisions. Hadoop is a dis-tributed file system that manages the distribution and storage of large files of data across many commodity servers. That, together with the MapReduce computing architecture, facilitates the inex-pensive parallel processing of chunks of data, which are reassem-bled into a complete answer to a specific problem.

hadoop data

The established big-data technologies like Hadoop and MapReduce have made big-data storage and computing inex-pensive. Esri, for example, had an engagement with the port of Rotterdam, Netherlands, the largest harbor in Europe, that demonstrates that proposition. The port wanted to develop a database of each ship-call in the harbor over a period of five years with the ability to track the movement of each ship in the harbor on each visit and to display that information on a map.

“The traditional approach would have been to store the data in a rela-tional database, but that would have been expensive, and this project was on a tight budget,” said Mansour Raad, a senior software architect at Esri.

When Raad went to gather up the necessary data, he found that much of it was stored on USB drives that were being kept haphazardly and gathering dust. “USB drives are where data goes to die,” he quipped.

By making use of the inexpensive commodity servers charac-teristic of big-data systems, Raad and his team were able to expose the ship data to the entire harbor community through an online platform. “The economics of the project were such that we were asked to bring in more capabilities that provided more insight into ship movements for the harbor community,” said Raad.

Although it has been adapted to the geospatial arena, Hadoop was not designed with geospatial data in mind, noted Mark Giaconia, director of Insight Platform Solutions at DigitalGlobe. “There are several different ways to incorporate the spatial dimen-sion into Hadoop,” he said. “You have to break down geospatial data into boxes so that every point on earth is correlated with a location on a grid. Many software libraries can turn primitive representations of geometry into geometric shapes dynamically.”

Of greater urgency is the collection and processing of ever-increasing volumes of data. “Geospatial big data means billions of vectors and rasters, and massive amounts of those every day,” said Giaconia. “We process 70 terabytes of imagery data per day and we need to change the way we interact with it. Ten years ago, almost anything you wanted to do could be done on the desktop. Today, with the demand for a lot of analytics and conditioning of data, it gets pushed back to clusters of servers in the cloud.”

Also challenging is the geospatial representation of social media feeds. “We collect geotagged tweets at the rate of 15 mil-lion per day,” Giaconia explained. “We now have over a billion of them in a database. You can’t just show that on a map anymore. They have to be segregated on the fly and represented in some other way.”

Baumann’s work has attacked this problem from the stand-point of databases and queries, having helped develop an open-source system called rasdaman, or raster data manager. “The two distinguishing features are the flexibility of the query language combined with the scalability of the parallelized array engine underneath,” he explained. “Today, rasdaman is running on 100-plus terabyte databases, and queries have been distributed across more than 1,000 cloud nodes. All this work actually has caught attention of the standardization bodies, and today we shape big-data standards in the Open Geospatial Consortium and the ISO.”

iNteGratiNG alGorithms

The focus of Lockheed Martin’s work in this area is to develop sophisticated algorithms that can integrate geospatial data with other data sources to unearth greater intelligence insights and to apply these in commercially developed big data environments. One problem to be tackled when applying unstructured social media feeds to a GEOINT picture is how to assess the credibility of the author.

“Credibility can be inferred by creating greater context around the social media data,” said Johnson. “Some texts make no claims

Mansour Raad

Richard Cooke


of location, but we can infer location from the text. We have created algorithms to run over vast amounts of social media text to create geospatial context. We can use social media content and the insights derived from it about what is going on in a specific location to focus collection of imagery by airborne assets and satellites to certain areas.”

Fusing social media feeds with geospatial infor-mation can be thought of as a form of connecting the crucial dots. “One thing we look for is similarities in data,” said Johnson. “These can reveal relationships that may be of interest.”

For example, tweets that mention the existence of protests in a certain area can be corroborated by imagery showing patterns of human movement. “It’s nice to have computers make those con-nections in real time so you don’t have to wait for an analyst to review the data and make a connection,” said Johnson.

“The system can alert an analyst of the situation and the analyst can then work on what to do about it,” he continued. “Lockheed Martin is working on how to combine information from various sources. There is still a lot of room for improvement in combining imagery and video with social media and other information sources together in a multi-INT picture.”

Storing and analyzing large networks is in many ways an unnatural fit for these scalable repositories, noted Dalzell. But the emergence of graph databases and distributed graph analytics environments such as GraphX on Spark are now allowing connec-tions and patterns to be mined effectively at scale.

“IBM i2 Enterprise Insight Analysis is an enterprise solu-tion that leverages IBM technology in order to identify patterns and connections at scale,” he added. “Fusing geospatial informa-tion from call data records, geo-temporal information from net-work location data with a broader range of intelligence, a holistic understanding can be garnered. This is all conducted over big data at speeds not previously possible, taking the time to intelli-gence product delivery from days to hours.”

The challenge of the upstream fusion of data to provide semantic context that makes sense across multiple INTs can be ameliorated by using graph representations of data, noted Palmer.

“The graph engine in the SAP HANA real-time data platform allows us to correlate more easily relationships between objects, people, events and organizations. Graphs can give analysts a clear understanding of non-obvious relationships and the ability to combine that with geospatial queries, non-structured analy-ses and machine learning algorithms in an open computing plat-form can really help with activity-based intelligence to resolve unknowns,” he added.

SAP HANA provides predictive, spatial and text analytics libraries that can run across multiple data sources.

Traditional databases can also infer relationships among entities, noted Palmer, but those relationships don’t persist in

the database. They exist only for the purposes of the immediate query. In graph representations of data, the relationships inferred persist, allowing refinements in the understanding of the relation-ships as more data are discovered.

imaGe aNd data scieNce

With all of these advancements in technol-ogy, analysts will continue to add value that only the human brain can supply, noted Marion, but automation will mean that fewer of those brains

will be required.“Geo-temporal indexing and geo-filtering of data turns out

to be an amazingly quick way for analysts to find correlations between data types,” he explained. “It allows analysts to do things much more quickly and to solve much more complicated problems.”

A round-the-clock system that Logos deployed to forward-operating bases requires only three analysts, while a system like Constant Hawk—an Army capability that delivers persistent wide-area surveillance to support pattern-of-life analyses—requires 30. Logos supplies miniaturized wide-area and other sensors to the U.S. military, including the Constant Hawk sensor.

For Cooke, part of the cultural issue involves moving beyond imaging science to data science. “Using data techniques is crucial when you are trying to extract patterns of life out of multi-INT data, especially when that includes unstructured, open-source intelligence,” he said. “Data science techniques come into play when you are looking for patterns that the human brain cannot possibly see. Mathematicians and data scientists are able to build models to find patterns and even to anticipate actions.”

Big data specialists know how to query large data sets in a way that traditional database people do not. “Big data people know how to leverage open sources,” said Giaconia. “Geospatial experts know how to ask geospatial questions such as ‘How many mosques are located within 1,000 meters of the source of this tweet?’ They also know how to query about things like lines of sight and land covers.”

At the same time, there are elements in the intelligence tra-decraft that technology will never have the ability or need to auto-mate. “We want human intervention in the analytic process. The best idea is to take small bites and to show analysts what is under the hood so that they can understand. And we need to run sys-tems in parallel for a while to get the confidence of analysts so they will want to take advantage of innovations,” Cooke said. O



Tony Frazier


Compiled by KMI Media Group staffIGF RESOURCE CENTER

Advertisers index2d3Sensing.................................................................................... 17www.2d3sensing.comAirbusDefence&Space................................................................. C4www.geo-airbusds.com/fresh-perspectiveLizardTech...................................................................................... C2www.lizardtech.com/tryitRiversideResearch.......................................................................... 8www.riversideresearch.org/textbookTextronSystems............................................................................... 5www.textronsystems.com/geospatial

CAlendArSeptember 22-24, 2015ModernDayMarineQuantico, Va.www.marinemilitaryexpos.com

September 24, 2015KalarisIntelligenceConference Washington, D.C.www.nga.mil/kalaris

October 12-14, 2015AUSAAnnualMeetingWashington, D.C. http://ausameetings.org

January 18-20, 2016DefenceGeospatialIntelligenceConferenceLondon, U.K.http://dgi.wbresearch.com

October 2015 Vol. 13, Issue 7NEXTISSUE


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Special Section


INDUSTRY INTERVIEW Intelligence & Geospatial Forum

Terry RyanFederal Government Sales Manager

LizardTech

Terry Ryan is the federal government sales manager for LizardTech, responsible for selling and distributing the company’s suite of software products. LizardTech specializes in software for compressing, managing, distributing and accessing large digital content, especially geospa-tial imagery, map data and LIDAR data. Ryan, a graduate of Loras College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in marketing and advertising, has a long history of working in sales, marketing and channel develop-ment for the geographic information sys-tems, remote sensing and computer-aided design industries.

Q: Your company recently launched GeoExpress 9.5. What are some of its key capabilities, and how can they benefit military and intelligence customers?

A: GeoExpress has evolved from a sim-ple compression engine to a set of power-ful image-processing tools that improve the workflow of any organization. Earlier versions of GeoExpress provided several beneficial features for GEOINT and warf-ighter support teams who have strategic, event-based and tactical action require-ments. Prior improvements worth men-tioning include improved processing speed through multi-core processor sup-port, flexible image manipulation and creation, an easy-to-use interface and unconstrained deployment in highly secure, fixed, remote and disconnected environments.

With GeoExpress 9.5, users can now compress LiDAR data to MrSID and LAZ formats natively with our LiDAR point cloud compression workflow. This will allow users of ortho-imagery and LiDAR data to access a common inter-face for all their compression needs. We’ve also introduced batch color balancing and multi-polygon cropping functional-ity. Batch color balancing allows for the color adjustment of one image and the application of those settings to many other images. The ability to define image cropping regions with single polygon or

multi-polygon shapefiles allows users to deliver the exact image regions that they’re interested in. It’s even possible to create separate images from each poly-gon. We’ve worked very hard to provide features that will benefit our military and intelligence users, and we hope that they find them useful.

Q: Along with the continued proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles come huge volumes of data in the form of imagery. How does GeoExpress benefit UAV users and their data collection?

A: GeoExpress 9.5, as part of our Express Suite solution, provides easy-to-use tools for UAV data collectors who would like to compress and easily manage their data collections. Additionally, our tools make it possible to increase the speed of deliv-ery and range of distribution of UAV data. We have seen a strong adoption rate of GeoExpress software among the UAV/ UAS community from three per-spectives: existing GeoExpress users who have acquired UAVs or have received UAS-generated data sets; new users who have entered the professional-grade mapping sector with a UAV platform; and our many partners and customers who have inte-grated UAS into their daily operations. For example, the Buckeye program at the Army Geospatial Center, Army Corps of Engineers, is an early adopter of UAVs and the UAS-associated workflows, including GeoExpress’s MrSID image compression

and the dissemination of that data to their customers. GeoExpress 9.5 provides UAV users with powerful image editing tools, interoperability with current and future applications, and storage savings.

Q: What are some of the other important ways in which you are currently delivering value to the defense and intelligence community?

A: We have seen a trend in our defense and intelligence community towards imple-mentations in highly tactical, forward-deployed, mobile application and rapid response missions. LizardTech’s value to this community comes from increasing the speed of compression, mosaicking, selective footprint extraction, dissemi-nation and visualization of hi-res com-pressed data.

Q: Where do you see the company moving in the future to continue to support national security customers?

A: We will continue to support an ever-changing and challenging global national security mission through the advent of new geospatial data management and dis-covery solutions. Our current products are in demand by national security orga-nizations all over the world. Along with our U.S. government users in the defense and civilian sectors, our users include national governments, secure energy pro-ducer organizations and critical infra-structure owners and operators across the globe.

Countries currently using our prod-ucts include Canada, United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Poland, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, Oman, Brazil, Australia, Singapore and the Philippines. We expect this trend to continue not only because of GeoExpress 9.5, but also thanks to the consistent revitalization of all our software offerings. We continue to benefit from customer loyalty and con-tinued commitment to our MrSID image compression format. O

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