Long Provides Blueprint for NGA Modernization #geoint2011

Letitia Long, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, provided a four-point plan for making her vision a reality. Last year at the GEOINT conference she emphasized that she wanted to put the power of geospatial intelligence in the hands of more users. This year she updated the GEOINT Symposium audience with the progress that the agency has made. The four elements of the plan are:

CONTENT - The goal is to expose 100% of the content within the agency and make it discoverable. Any source material,  commercial and NRO imagery; foundation data, whether it is spatial or aspatial in nature ... Whatever is in the analyst's shoebox and especially finished product she wants posted on NGA website.

OPEN IT ENVIRONMENT - Long wants an environment that is two way where users can contribute to the CONTENT environment as well.

CUSTOMER SERVICE - Long emphasized that it is all about the user experience.  "We are a full service organizations; we understand the user's footprint and can anticipate the needs of our customers; we need an open IT environment to expose all that content," she said. "We will always be embedded with our mission partner; but increasingly our mission partners are GIS-savvy. We encourage it. For users needing assisted service they can enter into a chat with an analyst that helps the mobile force in certain challenges, what Long calls proactive assisted service.

ANALYTICS DEPTH - Long emphasized that when content is easily accessible and the user is being served, then the NGA can get to the deeper analytics. Long said that over 100 applications for mobile use were being developed and she demonstrated an iPad app developed by NGA to help disaster response team.

Narrow your search further: defense, geoint 11, ic, intelligence, intelligence community, military, nga, remote sensing, satellite image analysis, satellite imagery, satellite imagery data

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.

For regular updates follow our reporting @directionsmag and @joefrancica.

Narrow your search further: defense, geoint, geoint2011, intelligence, military

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.

Narrow your search further: geoint, geoint 10, intelligence

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.

Narrow your search further: geoint, geoint 10, intelligence

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.]

Narrow your search further: geoint, geoint 10, intelligence