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BOOKS |
Foreign policy—including economic policy and national security policy—and the appropriate planning, decisionmaking, and execution of that policy depend upon foreign intelligence, which must be collected on a global scale, checked, compared, sifted, analyzed, and coordinated.
The history of mankind is filled with examples of both religious and secular leaders gathering information about a potential enemy and using it as best they could. Throughout history national leaders have gathered information about other peoples and lands to guide their decisions. The French and Indian wars in North America provide another example of the effect of intelligence on the strategy and tactics of opposing sides. The military projection of the losses that the communists would incur also proved to be correct. The lessons of Pearl Harbor arid World War II led to the conclusion that a formal structure for managing major national security affairs was needed. The phrase "departmental intelligence" is to be distinguished from the statutory reference to Central Intelligence and his agency concern with "intelligence relating to national security," a phrase that eventually was shortened simply to "national intelligence."
The core baseline of Intelligence-led Policing is the aim of increasing efficiency and quality of police work, with a focus on crime analysis and intelligence methods as tools for informed and objective decisions both when conducting targeted, specialized operations and when setting strategic priorities. This book critically addresses the proliferation of intelligence logics within policing from a wide array of scholarly perspectives. It considers questions such as:
How are precautionary logics becoming increasingly central in the dominant policing strategies?
What kind of challenges will this move entail?
What does the criminalization of preparatory acts mean for previous distinctions between crime prevention and crime detection?
What are the predominant rationales behind the proactive use of covert cohesive measures in order to prevent attacks on national security?
How are new technological measures, increased private partnerships and international cooperation challenging the core nature of police services as the main providers of public safety and security?
This book offers new insights by exploring dilemmas, legal issues and questions raised by the use of new policing methods and the blurred and confrontational lines that can be observed between prevention, intelligence and investigation in police work.
By drawing on longstanding procedures of scientific method, particularly hypothesis testing, this book strongly critiques standard intelligence analytic practices. It shows these practices to be inadequate, as they are illogical in terms of what formal philosophy says any intelligence analysts can realistically be expected to know, and for the future when analysts will face pressures to adapt to digital age modeling techniques.
The methodology focuses on identifying and remedying analytic errors caused by analyst cognitive biases and by foreign denial and deception. To demonstrate that it is a practical tool, it walks analysts through a case study, step by step, to show how its hypothesis testing can be implemented. It also invites a comparative test in the real world with any other intelligence methodologies to assess its strengths and weaknesses in predicting the outcome of an actual "live" intelligence issue.
This book discusses the application of hypothesis testing to the practice of intelligence analysis. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, public policy and national security, as well as practitioners.
A senior officer in the Central Intelligence Agency for twenty-five years presents revelations concerning the successful and unsuccessful secret operations in which he was involved and offers logical, specific arguments for future changes in the organization's policies.
Many hitherto classified facts have now been made public in the various reports of the official Washington investigations. The writer found it useful to cite some of these now open facts and to quote some official conclusions on matters beyond my competence
NEWS |
Ex-Navy leader Abigail Bradshaw CSC will take on her next big job as head of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) from September 6.
Bradshaw is the ASD’s deputy director-general and has led the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) since March 2020.
Beginning her career in the Royal Australian Navy, Bradshaw was awarded the Conspicuous Service Cross in 2005 and has previously served in roles with the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), Department of Home Affairs and Department of Immigration and the Australian Border Protection.
At Home Affairs, Bradshaw was deputy commander of maritime border command during the height of the people smuggling trade and also led offshore resources covering Europe and sub-Saharan Africa as the department’s inaugural chief risk officer.
Most recently, Bradshaw spearheaded the government’s cyber security partnership with industry. She has been credited with advancing Australia’s national resilience and playing a “pivotal role” in developing partnerships between government and industries at a global scale.
Threats from terrorist groups such as ISIS are again surging across the globe three years after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, an exit that marked a new phase in the war on terrorism.
ISIS has claimed responsibility for several deadly attacks this year across the world, from Turkey to Iran and Russia. ISIS-affiliated actors also carried out a stabbing attack in Germany this month and threatened a Taylor Swift concert in Austria.
U.S. spy agencies are broadening their efforts to collaborate with the private sector via a slew of new initiatives to better enhance government-industry partnerships that have frequently armed analysts with tools needed to study data, track terrorists and thwart cyberattacks.
Among several new projects, the intelligence community will soon update its workforce performance objectives to include engagement goals with the private sector, and is working to improve access to industry and academia-provided data for use in day-to-day work, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines said.
“We know that the private sector increasingly possesses certain unique and specialized talent, knowledge and capabilities in key fields of critical importance to national security that we don’t have access to in the government,” Haines said at an event in Bethesda, Maryland that was hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a nonprofit group supporting the U.S. intelligence community and industry counterparts.
Drug-resistant pathogens could cause more than 39 million deaths over the next 25 years, according to new estimates published in The Lancet.
The study also predicts that 169 million deaths will be associated with drug-resistant infections in that time.
The researchers base their forecasts on analysis of recent deaths and the impact of measures to curb AMR deaths over time. They found that more than 1 million people died each year as a result of drug-resistant infections between 1990 and 2021.
ARTICLES |
In recent years, elite commercial spyware vendors like Intellexa and NSO Group have developed an array of powerful hacking tools that exploit rare and unpatched “zero-day” software vulnerabilities to compromise victim devices. And increasingly, governments around the world have emerged as the prime customers for these tools, compromising the smartphones of opposition leaders, journalists, activists, lawyers, and others. On Thursday, though, Google's Threat Analysis Group is publishing findings about a series of recent hacking campaigns—seemingly carried out by Russia's notorious APT29 Cozy Bear gang—that incorporate exploits very similar to ones developed by Intellexa and NSO Group into ongoing espionage activity.
Between November 2023 and July 2024, the attackers compromised Mongolian government websites and used the access to conduct “watering hole” attacks, in which anyone with a vulnerable device who loads a compromised website gets hacked. The attackers set up the malicious infrastructure to use exploits that “were identical or strikingly similar to exploits previously used by commercial surveillance vendors Intellexa and NSO Group,” Google’s TAG wrote on Thursday. The researchers say they “assess with moderate confidence” that the campaigns were carried out by APT29.
These spyware-esque hacking tools exploited vulnerabilities in Apple's iOS and Google's Android that had largely already been patched. Originally, they were deployed by the spyware vendors as unpatched, zero-day exploits, but in this iteration, the suspected Russian hackers were using them to target devices that hadn't been updated with these fixes.
In April, Colorado became the first state to mandate that companies protect the privacy of data generated from a person’s brain waves, an action spurred by concerns over the commercial use of wearable devices intended to monitor users’ brain activity. Use of those and other devices that enable the collection of humans’ physiological data warrants robust discussion of the legal and moral implications of the increasing surveillance and datafication of people’s lives.
Biometric technologies measure intimate body characteristics or behaviors, such as fingerprints, retinas, facial structure, vein patterns, speech, breathing patterns, brainwaves, gait, keystroke patterns, and other movements. While much activity in the field has focused on authenticating individuals’ identities in security applications, some biometric technologies are touted as offering deeper insights into humans’ states of mind and behaviors. It’s when these biometric capabilities are put into play that companies may endanger consumers’ trust.
Hundreds of pagers belonging to the armed group Hezbollah exploded on Tuesday in Lebanon, killing at least 12 people and wounding about 2,750. Some pagers belonging to Hezbollah also exploded in Syria, leading to some injuries.
Lebanon, Hezbollah and the group’s allies have all blamed Israel. But what really happened? Many analysts believe the answer might lie in how Hezbollah got the pagers in the first place — because that might hold clues to whether the devices were tampered with to facilitate the explosions.
In John le Carré’s landmark espionage novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, undersecretary Oliver Lacon outlines the obvious problem in unearthing a traitor at the heart of the British secret service. “It’s the oldest question of all, George,” he muses to the hero, George Smiley. “Who can spy on the spies? Who can smell out the fox without running with him?”
Yet in the modern setting of corporate intelligence – an industry that collates research on the business world and employs its fair share of former state-agency operatives – there appears to be no such issue.
Over the past few years there has been increasing scrutiny on an industry which has always had a reputation for operating in the shadows. This trend may increase now that Varun Chandra, who previously ran the London corporate intelligence firm Hakluyt, has joined the Labour government as a special adviser for business and investment.
That scrutiny is most obvious in the publicity surrounding the scandals that occasionally befall the sector. Examples have recently included allegations of “intimidation” and covert surveillance by one operator, Kroll, as it tried to track hedge fund managers betting on falls in the share price of now-disgraced Wirecard; or Lynton Crosby’s CT Group, which this year stood accused of unlawfully gathering privileged information in a high court battle over a multibillion-dollar estate linked to a dead Russian billionaire.
REPORT |
Russian intelligence failed President Vladimir Putin in supporting the most consequential decision of statecraft – war – before Russia’s 2022 (re)invasion of Ukraine but has since somewhat recovered, possibly redeeming itself in Putin’s estimation by securing his regime nearly two and a half years since his shambolic invasion. This article complements our previous article in this journal, The Autocrat’s Intelligence Paradox: Vladimir Putin’s (mis)management of Russian strategic assessment in the Ukraine War, which examined the systemic roots of Russia’s intelligence failure in early 2022. In this follow-on article exploring Russian intelligence’s traditional areas of (relative) competence in the period following the full-scale invasion, we consider the categories of espionage, sanctions evasion, active measures, and repression, and conclude that Putin’s security and intelligence organs have reasserted themselves with terrible vigour, domestically and internationally. Despite notable failings – and some flaps – they have been indispensable to Putin by securing his regime, at least through mid-2024.
Rapid advances in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies since late 2022, particularly the deployment of Generative AI (GenAI) chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated the potential for AI to revolutionize how states conduct intelligence work. AI technologies are very likely to continue to rapidly advance given the large amount of investment from the private sector and nation states, with some experts predicting we will see the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a type of AI that achieves, or surpasses, human-level capacity for learning, perception, and cognitive flexibility – by the end of this decade. Even if this ambitious goal is not fully met, the LLMs available within the next three years will probably far surpass the capabilities of systems we use today and will be able to solve complex problems, take action to collect and sort data, and deliver well-reasoned assessments at scale and at speed.
There are opportunities for U.S. and Australian IC leaders to collaborate on the development and responsible deployment of AIs for intelligence analysis. Potential areas for cooperation include articulating ethical and analytic standards for the use of AI systems, exchanging findings from AI testing and evaluation programs, sharing best practices in the management of humanmachine teams, and piloting the use of AI to tackle discrete intelligence analysis problems on a shared high-side data cloud.
Conducted through a collaboration between the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), this project seeks to illuminate AI's potential to enhance allsource intelligence analysis. The authors engaged experts from the national security and emerging technology sectors through a series of workshops held simultaneously in Canberra and Washington.
OPINION |
This year’s Annual NZIIP Conference delivered on its aspiration to Demystify Intelligence. Beginning with Director General GCSB, Andrew Clark, the day’s speakers provided unique perspectives on how the intelligence profession can come out of the shadows and make itself more widely known, and appreciated, to a public audience.
With a sense of humour and some creative use of AI tools, Andrew used the extraction, movement, refinement, and use of oil as a metaphor for intelligence. In so doing, he demonstrated how easy it can be to demystify the people, process, and products of intelligence and to communicate concepts in a way everyone can understand.
Andrew also provided relevant insight into the importance of walking in your customers shoes, and that’s not just the decision-maker you work for. Ultimately the customer is those that the intelligence professional and the decision-maker alike serve – the public.
Andrew Clark Director General GCSB
Across the course of the day, this theme of intelligence being of use to those we serve was recurrent. Our panel of academics recalled the challenges they faced of gaining access to information, as well as how much they valued proactive releases of information. Often the media turns to academia for insights into the intelligence community, and so the importance of having genuine, two-way, push-pull, conversations with discussed, as a means of building the trust and understanding required to better support the analyst and the public. It also became evident how much academia and intelligence can share in common, including the resilience required to tenaciously search for information, process it with diligence, and disseminate it in the hope that it will have an impact in the real world.
In an earlier article looking at Pacific national security planning, I addressed the strategy-execution gap amongst Pacific Island Countries (PIC). The article recommended four macro-shifts to close the strategy-execution gap but had less to say about managing growing complexity in Pacific national security planning. The Pacific Regional Security Outlook 2023–24 (PIFS and PFC, 2024) forecasts an increasingly complex security environment dominated by intersecting strategic challenges, both national and regional.
Despite this growing complexity, much Pacific national security planning embodies reductionist reasoning — breaking things down into parts and looking at the properties of these parts. The dominant parts are usually threats such as climate change, transnational organised crime, and human security. For example, the Boe Declaration Action Plan (PIFS, 2019) identifies six ‘strategic pillars’ — which are parts of a much larger and complex challenge.
TALKS, WEBINARS & PRESENTATIONS |
Mike Morell was with President Bush on the morning of 9/11. He saw the President several times that day. Ten years later he was with President Obama for the bin Laden raid. He was former Acting and Deputy Director of the CIA. He comes from Ohio. For the rest, it’s best if you hear Mike.
“I believe that when we get to the end of the trail, we’re going to find al Qaeda, and we’re going to find an Osama bin Laden. I told him that I was so confident in that judgment that I would bet my children’s future on it.”
Explore HR issues arising from applications of AI and regulatory reform processes for Australia.
Guest speaker:
Nicholas Davis, Human Technology Institute, University of Technology Sydney
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The subjects, thoughts, opinions, and information made available in AIPIO Acumen reflect the authors' views, not those of the AIPIO.