Dr. Thomas Fingar, Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis
Mr. Jardines introduces Dr. Fingar.
Dr. Fingar states that intelligence today is a lot harder to be an analyst today than in the Cold War. The two sides were defined. Today the number of countries and local level politics and many other examples need to be identified in order to answer questions by policy makers in Washington, military leaders around the world and law enforcement locally. They need the answers at the speed of information and unless we can provide those answers that quickly we fail. Open source intelligence is one of the fastest way to get and give information.
The effort is to give them something they didn’t already know. Even just tweaking the information that already exists is helpful. It is more than googling and more than checking a wiki entry. How is it more? He says the way in the past to gain information was not to go to the library and troll through the card catalogue but instead to make use of the research librarians. The point is to make use of the expert knowledge managers. We don’t want to suck in all information from everywhere but instead to pinpoint what is useful. The goal is to make collecting and organizing information a normal part of the workflow.
Expertise needs to be identified and maintained within the network. Capturing the information about who and what sources are the best for what question or problem set. This knowledge base should be available not only inside the IC but amongst everyone working on the problem. Just because information is on a classified system does not make it classified. We have to make sure that the sharing of this information is useful and rewarded.
