Beyond Simple Searching

The moderator for this panel is Eric Haseltine, Associate Director of National Intelligence for Science and Technology, ODNI

The panel:

• John Howard, Deputy Associate Director of Enterprise Solutions (Intelink), Office of the Chief Information Officer, ODNI
• James Mulvenon, Director, Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, Defense Group Inc.
• Francis Kubala, Scientist, BBN Technologies
• Jason Hines, Principal Search Engineer, Google

Dr. Haseltine discusses the problem with search and the challenge today:is there hope?

Mr. Howard mentions the acronym ICABOD, which is a new program coming soon (note: we will flesh this acronym out later). The point of it is discovery, the “D” at the end. The challenge of information discovery is the next major issue to be solved.

Mr. Kubala of BBN Technologies identifies how their methodology and software structures and gives meaning to video/audio to text feed technology. They are also working on technology that will be able to identify the context of a query and serve up similar or related information, and in multiple languages that would not require the analyst to know that language.

Mr. Mulvenon speaks on the difficulty in searching the internet in Chinese. He wants to show what cutting edge methodologies they have learned and used in searching for Open Source Intelligence on a difficult subject. The first barrier is, of course, the Chinese language. Finding clearable linguists is a big problem. He is finding the average to get a native speaker cleared is 3 to 4 years. The Chinese internet also has a major firewall that is blocked to foreign IP addresses, requiring searching from within China (or appearing to be searching from within China). He uses blogs and bulletin boards but the technological problem he has had is that they are using locally produced software. He goes beyond looking at port 80 (browsing) but insteadlooks at the plumbing of the internet to assess the holding of certain websites. He also combines indigenous mapping websites from China and mashes the information gleaned with Google Earth. He also details creative searching and extrapolating information from the target’s neighbors in the case that the original does not have the information accessible to the analyst.

Mr. Hines states that Google takes their mission to make all of the world’s information accessible very seriously. He discusses the Goggle Enterprise Systems, Google Apps and Google Enterprise Search as well as some of the advanced features such as maps, news archives and machine translation services. He challenges the Open Source professionals to come back to Google and tell them how they can help the IC be more successful in search.

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