Over 4000 in Attendance at GEOINT in San Antonio #geoint2011

Stu Shea, CEO of the USGIF announces that over 4000 are in attendance at the GEOINT Symposium. James R. Clapper, Jr., Director of National Intelligence, provides the keynote address at opening session.

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The Cyber-Location Nexus: How the Cyber Defense Community can Leverage Location #GEOINT

There were two very prominent elements that were exposed at this session at the GEOINT conference in New Orleans:

1. The ability to map cyberspace has advanced to the point of understanding social relationships and the connectivity of disparate sources such as through various social media networks.  John Kelley of Morningside Analytics showed various diagrams such as a map of the blogosphere in Iran (see example below). He showed clusters of groups favorable to the Islamists and others who were followers of one Ayatollah or another.
2. The next step in understanding cyber-warfare is to tie it to location. Ideally, the correlation would be accomplished in real-time such that it will advise on how weapons platforms and interdiction efforts are deployed.

As mentioned above, one of the more fascinating parts of the session was delivered by Kelly who showed various cyber-maps depicting the relationships within the blogosphere by country. While his “maps” were not identifying a location for the source of each unit of social media, he emphasized the importance of doing so eventually. His objective is to where the physical and virtual worlds meet, essentially establishing a cyber–social geography where patterns of affiliation can be recognized and classified based on common group identities. He emphasized that what happens in cyberspace is tied to real people and real locations.

Another member of the panel, Kevin Pomfret, a lawyer with the Center for Spatial Law and Policy, emphasized that “As we talk about geospatial and cyberspace and the nexus, it’s important to remember, law is still tied to a geographic area.” Pomfret compared current U.S. laws that look to protect the citizen from unwarranted intrusion of privacy from companies or the government making unlawful use location-based social networks to that of China.  He said that in china, you have a country without restrictions on what information they can collect on their citizenry. They have built a sophisticated system to monitor people which have interesting ramifications for industrial espionage.

Maj. Gen. Suzanne M. Vautrinot, U.S. Air Force, and the director of Plans and Policy at the U.S. Cyber Command at Ft. Meade gave the opening keynote to this session and said that the amount of money lost from cyber crime exceeds the amount of money lost on drug-related crime; it’s why there is so much emphasis in terms on cyber within homeland security discussions.

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Of Standards, Interoperablity and Budget Constraints for the Defense-Intelligence Community #GEOINT

Gil Klinger, the director of the Space and Intelligence Office, and Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, for the Department of Defense (DoD) was speaking in the session on “Interoperability, Standards and Architecture" at the GEOINT conference in New Orleans. Specifically he was addressing the applications of emerging sensors and how each interoperate with each other. In the context of then turning those new data into information, he said, "None of that stuff means a damn, it simply doesn’t happen, if we don’t get this piece right ... As unappealing as interoperability and standards, and architecture approach are, they are all the more important now."

Klinger said that the government was running up against a massive recapitalization of our infrastructure. "We’ve run out the lifetimes [of intelligence infrastructure] during the course of two wars. “Against this backdrop, we are on the front end of a very serious downturn of the defense budget. We’ll be lucky to have a flat line budget in the next few years. It becomes more and more important as budgets get tighter to put an emphasis on adhering to standards," said Klinger.

What’s the connection between standards and interoperability? Klinger said it’s a case of "1+1=3." For him, it amounts to being able to take a specific source of information that may have run its course of usefulness on its own right, but when knitted together with other sources, it may allow analysts to look at the data in an entirely different way.

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Army General Has Clear Vision for Geospatial Needs #GEOINT

U.S. Army General Mary Legere, the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command has a very clear vision of what she needs from geospatial information. General Legere states that the GEOINT vision for the Army is to have "accessible, timely, tailored GEOINT at the forward edge; near real-time access and multi-INT cross-cueing." She said that she needs force protection and decisions from “space to mud” providing the best technologies and practices.

But she also had competing needs. She’d love to have persistent surveillance but will settle for something close to that. She also said, "We are drowning in data” and “geospatial data is integrated into everything we do." And because of the Army’s diverse missions, everything from fighting terrorists to supporting humanitarian aid, Legere pleaded with the technology vendors to "build us technology that helps us…we need you to tell us what is possible in the world of technology."

To get across her point about how much the Army relies on geospatial intelligence and mapping technology, she said that the Army is very visual, ‘we like to see things and we like to blow things up; but before we do we need to know that we’re not blowing up an embassy (paraphrased).’

"We bring more soldiers home because of the technology," said Legere.

Legere was an excellent speaker and a forward thinker. The Army has a true technologist leading the way.


[Disclosure: The USGIF supported a portion of travel costs to the conference this year.]

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National Reconnaissance Office Director Discusses Aggressive Satellite Launch Mission

Bruce Carlson, the director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), was a most entertaining speaker on stage at the GEOINT conference, especially for someone who is one of the nation’s leading technology spymasters. Displaying a wry sense of humor, Carlson entertained the audience with an adroit understanding of the mission at hand. The history of the NRO is that it is an agency that was only declassified in 1992 and was moved to a location in Chantilly, Virginia. And if you’ve ever driven by their facility, it still screams, “go away!”

Charged with launching the nation’s spy satellites, the NRO is now on the most aggressive launch campaign in 20 years according to Carlson. But he also cautioned that it’s a different business than it was back then. There are fewer people and less infrastructure to support the NRO’s mission. But Carlson was on a mission to produce a new generation of launch vehicles.  His priorities were very succinct: execute launches on time and budget; improve the business of launch; improve research and technology investment; and invest in the NRO workforce.

Carlson says that he has increased the size of the science and technology portion of his budget within his budget even though his budget has shrunk. He sees as one of his main goals as guaranteeing a process of mission assurance. He wants to increase the number of missions by simplifying some of the processes although there are certain lower limits that they cannot go under.

Carlson said that his requests for imagery to the NRO always overtax the resources he can provide. Some users will get commercial imagery because NRO cannot always satisfy all the requests. NRO does not see the commercial space initiative as a competitor to the NRO’s mission.

Carlson’s goal over the next six months is to demonstrate competency to carry out this aggressive mission in launching a new generation of satellites an modernizing the geriatric constellation now in existence. "We are concerned about our susceptibility to attack," said Carlson who essentially operates the fourth largest communications company in the US.

See the video of his entire remarks.

[Disclosure: The USGIF supported a portion of travel costs to the conference this year.]

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