It all started with a click of a mouse. BAE Systems Director of Business Development, Nate Copeland, received a message about a video clip he should watch from a friend via Facebook. What Copeland didn’t realize was that this video was about to inspire him to open his heart and welcome a new family member into his life.
Today, we – the intelligence community and industry – must create new value by collaboratively exploiting traditional and emerging multi-INT solutions to provide actionable intelligence to our warfighters.
By definition, multiple intelligence (multi-INT) is the fusion of different types of data collection to provide a full operating picture for the warfighter. Historically, this has included signal intelligence (SIGINT), where signals between either people or electronic communications are intercepted to identify a target. Also, measurement and signal intelligence, or MASINT, detects and classifies targets by identifying technical signatures.
The age of digitalization has allowed information sharing to occur with unprecedented ease and speed; it has also resulted in the exposure of a much broader bank of information about our government, infrastructure, and public citizens alike.
In an effort to provide additional insight into key defense and intelligence issues, we are launching a video blog to share our experts' ideas and thoughts directly with you. This platform will be an expansion of the written forum that was started in 2011, and will showcase the “faces” of our subject matter experts discussing relevant news, market trends and legislative activities, as well as perspectives on key topics such as cybersecurity and counterintelligence.
The first edition comes courtesy of our Law Enforcement subject matter expert, Technical Director for Global Analysis, John Slattery. John shares his perspective on a recent Supreme Court ruling requiring warrants for FBI and Law Enforcement personnel to use GPS tracking on private vehicles to track “persons of interest” and potential informants.
In the Washington Post report The Hunt for Bin Laden, the authors point out that “the most important question wasn’t ‘Where is bin Laden?’ but rather ‘How does he communicate?’” This real example of how shifting from location-based analysis to activity-based analysis changed the game to understand and track the world’s most wanted terrorist.
On November 29, the Washington Post published an article that shed light on a closely guarded network of tunnels in China allegedly used to transport nuclear weapons. While the research offered interesting information regarding the breadth and sophistication of China’s arsenal, it was the derivation and authors of a cited report that struck a chord with those of us invested in advancing open source intelligence (OSINT) analysis as a professionalized trade.
To learn more about our capabilities, joining our team or becoming a partner, please contact us.