by Tim Shorrock
In 2006, more clues to the NSA’s latest program were provided by New Scientist, a British magazine. It discovered that the NSA was funding research into the “mass harvesting” of information that people post about themselves on social networks on the Internet, such as MySpace. By using the information from these networks, the magazine concluded that the NSA “could harness advances in internet technology” and “combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.”93 New Scientist discovered the NSA’s research quite by accident in a scientific paper entitled “Semantic Analytics on Social Networks,” written by a research team at the University of Georgia and the University of Maryland, which focused on how data from online social networks could be combined with other databases to uncover new and unknown facts about people. A footnote in the paper explained that the research was sponsored by ARDA.
One of ARDA’s primary aims is to make sense of the massive amounts of data the NSA collects from its eavesdropping and surveillance systems. Given the descriptions of the NSA’s Turbulence and the NSA’s promise to “live on the network,” the ARDA research into social networks and the Internet seems like a logical progression. And even the NSA’s staunchest critics say Turbulence is something the NSA should be doing. “I’d be surprised and upset if they weren’t doing that,” says Jim Dempsey, a FISA expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology.94 So far, however, the results have not impressed the House and Senate oversight committees with jurisdiction over the NSA. Congress’s displeasure was spelled out in March 2007 by the Senate Armed Services Committee when it held a confirmation hearing for Air Force General James Clapper to be the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. In its written questions to Clapper, the committee noted the previous problems with Trailblazer and, for the first time in public, mentioned the new program. “Since Congress first acted to stimulate better executive branch oversight of NSA systems acquisition, NSA’s transformation program, Trailblazer, has been terminated because of severe management problems, and its successor, Turbulence, is experiencing the same management deficiencies that have plagued NSA since at least the end of the Cold War,” the committee wrote.95
I have not been able to confirm any contractor for the Turbulence program. One contractor familiar with NSA operations said the most likely candidates for the Turbulence contracts are the companies affiliated with TIA and Project Groundbreaker, which was renewed, as mentioned earlier, for three more years starting in 2007. A look through the “strategic alliance partners” involved with Groundbreaker reveals many of the companies we have discussed in this book. Among them are BAE Systems, L-3/Titan, CACI, EDS, General Dynamics, ManTech, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Nortel, Northrop Grumman/Essex, Raytheon, and NCI. None of these companies would respond to questions about their relationship with the NSA or their possible role in Turbulence.
We will pick up the story of the NSA and its corporate partners in surveillance in chapter 9. Before that, we will visit the geospatial side of intelligence and the companies that have made the merger of signals and imagery into an art form: the pure plays.
7
Intelligence Disneyland
ONE OF THE BIGGEST events of the year for the Intelligence Community is the annual conference and exhibition sponsored by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. The USGIF is a nonprofit corporation based in Herndon, Virginia, that promotes the interests of the contractors doing business with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. With a classified budget of about $2.5 billion a year, the NGA is responsible for collecting and analyzing imagery downloaded from U.S. surveillance satellites and aircraft and disseminating it to other intelligence and homeland security agencies, domestic law enforcement, and the Pentagon. Geospatial intelligence incorporates a wide variety of disciplines, including mapping, high-resolution photography, three-dimensional and thermal imagery, and live video, and is used in everything from climate studies and human rights reporting to the tracking of enemy soldiers and insurgents in Iraq.
The NGA was formally inaugurated as a combat support agency of the Pentagon in 2003. Initially known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, it was cobbled together in the early 1990s from the relevant divisions of more than a dozen intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret agency responsible for managing and operating the nation’s spy satellites. The USGIF was organized in 2004 by executives from two of the NGA’s largest contractors, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, with assistance from Republican lawmakers from the House Intelligence Committee. Since then, its membership has expanded to 115 companies and agencies, and its annual budget exceeds $1 million.
Its leading members, known as strategic partners, pay $50, 000 a year to belong. They include most of the NGA’s top commercial vendors as well as its biggest user in government, the CIA; the NGA itself is also a member. K. Stuart Shea, the foundation’s president and CEO, is the vice president of the space and geospatial intelligence business unit of Science Applications International Corporation, another leading contractor. Other top corporate members of the USGIF include GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, which operate the country’s only commercial surveillance satellites and sell the bulk of their imagery to the NGA; Environmental Systems Research Institute and Analytical Graphics Inc., the leading commercial vendors of imagery software; Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, and other big systems integrators; and a handful of companies not normally associated with intelligence, such as Oracle and Microsoft.
The foundation’s annual fall conference has become the nation’s premier showcase for intelligence contractors and agencies alike, and brings together all the key players in the $50 billion Intelligence-Industrial Complex. They come because the NGA has strong ties throughout the sixteen-member Intelligence Community and offers a neutral ground for the disparate and sometimes warring agencies that dominate the IC. As a result, the USGIF’s annual event, dubbed GEOINT, provides one of the few open windows into the thinking at the highest levels of U.S. intelligence, and is both informative and entertaining.
The highlight of the 2004 symposium was a joint appearance by the directors of the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the NGA—the only time during the seven years of the Bush administration that the top officials from those three collection agencies all spoke from the same stage during a public, unclassified event. During that session, outgoing CIA director George Tenet made his first public defense of his stormy tenure at the agency. “If you read everything in the newspapers, you’re led to believe that we’re about as dumb and stupid as anyone on the face of the earth, and we’re not,” he said, startling some observers with his vehemence.1 At GEOINT 2005, Mary Margaret Graham, the deputy director for collection in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, committed one of the biggest intelligence gaffes in recent history when she accidentally disclosed the nation’s intelligence budget for that year—$44 billion. Her blooper, noted by an alert reporter from U.S. News & World Report, marked the first time since 1998 that the aggregate figure for U.S. spending on its spy agencies had been revealed, and provided a solid benchmark to gauge intelligence spending into the future.
GEOINT 2006 took place at the swank Gaylord Palms Resort in Orlando, Florida, an eight-hundred-room hotel and convention center about a mile from Disney World. The lineup of government speakers, as in earlier years, came from the highest levels of the IC. John Negroponte, Michael McConnell’s predecessor as director of national intelligence, delivered the keynote address on the closing day. In what turned out to be his last public speech as DNI, Negroponte eloquently described the science of geospatial intelligence. GEOINT—geospatial intelligence—is “a window providing undeniable evidence of events taking place on the ground; GEOINT reveals hidden aspects of otherwise poorly understood phenomena,” he said, “it brin
gs visual clarity and precision to identifying and locating targets anywhere on the globe; it enables us to search vast expanses of the earth’s surface; and it depicts intelligence issues in areas otherwise denied to us.” He was preceded to the stage by several of his top aides and more than a dozen high-ranking officials from the CIA, the NSA, and the DIA, as well as the director of the NGA, Navy Admiral Robert Murrett.
GEOINT 2007, held at the spacious Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas, offered up an equally stellar lineup of speakers that included Marine Corps General James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Marine Corps Major General Michael E. Ennis, the deputy director for community HUMINT at the CIA; and Brian V. Biesecker, the technical director of analysis and production for the National Security Agency. “Today we have the giants of industry and government standing together,” Jeffrey Harris, the vice president and managing director for situational awareness for Lockheed Martin and the former director of the National Reconnaissance Office, said in San Antonio as he introduced a panel of speakers from the Intelligence Community and the private sector.
Because the NGA falls under the Pentagon’s command and control system, its primary responsibility is to provide imagery and maps for ongoing military operations. “When the fog of war thickens, GEOINT creates a visual picture of the battlespace,” says an NGA pamphlet distributed in Orlando. “From the White House to the tip of the spear, GEOINT enables decisions, shortens wars and saves lives.” Since 2005, the NGA has been sending special imagery teams to Iraq and Afghanistan to assist U.S. air and ground forces there. By the fall of 2007, the agency had two hundred specialists deployed in thirty-eight locations in six countries, and was also providing close support to U.S. Special Forces teams, NGA officials said.2 NGA teams, Admiral Murrett disclosed during GEOINT 2006, have been deployed with military units directly engaged in combat and supply computer feeds of urban areas in Iraq “which are most threatening” to the troops. Target areas have included the city of Ramadi, where U.S. troops fought running battles with Sunni insurgents throughout 2006. A “key component” of the NGA’s support for the war, Murrett said, is providing streaming video from low-flying Predators and other aircraft. “Video in support of operations is increasing in importance and increasing in complexity, and NGA is very much a part of that in all the places where we are threatened in Central Iraq,” he said.3 In a briefing for reporters, Murrett explained that the NGA’s overhead video is enhanced with additional capabilities for data mining, transforming the pictures into “automated tools for detection.”
To capture much of its military-related imagery, the NGA relies on a network of highly classified satellites controlled by the National Reconnaissance Office. The same satellites are used by the NSA for its global signals intelligence system, thus creating a strong, symbiotic relationship between the NGA and its sister national collection agencies, including the CIA. “We are the glue that holds together the Intelligence Community,” says Murrett.4 Since 9/11, the NGA’s relationship with the NSA and NRO has deepened in significant ways. Information generated by the national agencies, for example, is increasingly collected and analyzed at large ground stations run jointly by the NSA, the NRO, and the NGA. At these centers, analysts and contractors combine imagery and signals intercepts to monitor people and events in real time—a synthesis that intelligence officials like to call the “magic on the ground.”
During GEOINT 2006, then–NRO director Donald Kerr disclosed that the NGA, NSA, and the NRO were building a new listening post—at a site he would not identify—that will establish a new model of collaboration in U.S. intelligence. At this “unknown ground station,” he said, “we are integrating data that comes from our entire U.S. SIGINT system, from imaging capabilities and other space assets, and doing it to a cell at that ground station, which is empowered to other tasking as well. We’re doing real-time collection, fusion, and tasking modifications to get a better intelligence effect.”5 These ground stations are major operations: according to Lance Killoran, the NRO’s director for imagery acquisition, the NRO owns the fifth-largest communications network in the United States. At the ground stations, less than 20 percent of the data is from the NRO; “the other 80 percent is from you,” he said, meaning the NGA, the NSA, and their contractors.6
Imagery and signals intelligence are also collected by the U.S. Navy, whose newest ships and aircraft carriers come equipped with America’s most advanced listening and eavesdropping technology. As a result, said Kerr, “our carrier strike groups are going to sea looking more like mobile ground stations than ever before.”7 Submarines, too, are getting in on the action: according to Loren B. Thompson, an analyst at a military think tank called the Lexington Institute, submarines today “are used mainly for conducting clandestine reconnaissance in littoral regions, and there is a surge in demand for their collections from intelligence agencies and combatant commanders.”8
The ties between the national collection agencies were institutionalized in 2005, when the NSA and the NGA announced a far-reaching agreement to share resources and swap staff. The document announcing the agreement itself is classified. In its only public explanation so far, the NGA said in a press release that the agreement allows “horizontal integration,” which it defined as “working together from start to finish, using NGA’s ‘eyes’ and NSA ‘ears,’” thus making it possible “to solve intelligence challenges that cannot be resolved through separate application of normal GEOINT or SIGINT methods.”9 The NSA’s Biesecker says that, under the agreement, 40 percent of the two agencies’ staffs are now “conversational” with both SIGINT and GEOINT.10
These collaborative efforts have had a dramatic impact on the war in Iraq. During GEOINT 2006, NGA director Robert Murrett explained how the NGA and the NSA work together on the battlefield. In an unusually detailed briefing, he disclosed that both agencies were deeply involved in the 2006 capture and killing of Abu Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq (earlier, remember, we learned that CACI had been involved in this operation). According to Murrett, U.S. forces were tipped off to Zarqawi’s location and cell phone number by an unlikely source—Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser. With that information, the NSA began monitoring his movements through phone intercepts, while the NGA flew Predators over the area to take live video. All of that data was fed to an F-16, which dropped two bombs on the house, killing everybody inside. “Eventually, it all comes down to physical location,” said Murrett. The networking between the two agencies and military forces on the ground, he said, “is absolutely essential. When we have NSA and NGA partnering on combating Al Qaeda, the multiplier effect is dramatic.”11
The NGA’s origins go back to the early 1990s, when Robert Gates was director of central intelligence in the administration of President George H. W. Bush. At the time, U.S. national security officials were just beginning to understand the new world that was presenting itself in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the stunning defeat of Saddam Hussein’s army in Kuwait during the first Gulf War. A commission appointed by Gates to study how intelligence had functioned during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm found that updating maps and other visual information was a difficult and tedious exercise for military commanders. For instance, commanders in the field sometimes had to wait up to a week to receive the mapping data they had requested, compared to mere minutes for the transmission of signals and other forms of electronic intelligence. It was a “horror story,” recalls retired Air Force Brigadier General Michael G. Lee, who is now a vice president in the global security solutions division of Lockheed Martin. “The imagery couldn’t get to the battlefield.”12 Moreover, transmission itself was crude and slow: in the early days, images collected from satellites could only be printed out because the files were too large to be sent electronically from one computer to another. And while it took one call to the NSA to talk to someone about signals intelligence, there was no single point of contact at either the Pentagon or the C
IA for imagery.
The imagery community “was a loose association of semi-friends operating in relative independence from one another,” says Richard Haver of Northrop Grumman. “And when you asked imagery [officials] for something you had at least five phone calls to make. It was very frustrating.”13 Haver knows the story well: during the administration of the first George Bush, he was the intelligence adviser to Secretary of Defense Cheney, a post he held again during the first two years of Rumsfeld’s reign at the Pentagon.
One reason that people like Haver were calling imagery offices was the changing demands on U.S. intelligence. Up to the early 1990s, the fine art of satellite and aerial surveillance, particularly the CIA’s high-altitude reconnaissance of Soviet bases and missiles, had been used primarily by national leaders to understand the “strategic balance” with the Soviets. But as Cold War tensions ebbed and new threats began to emerge in the eyes of the nation’s military and political elite, it became clear that the wonders of computerized mapping had revolutionary implications in war, particularly in asymmetric warfare—a military buzzword used to describe conflicts between the United States and insurgencies—and counterterrorism. Imagery, according to Haver, became “something that was essential on the battlefield.”
Gates’s proposals to create a central imagery intelligence office took several years to germinate. The initial idea was nixed by Colin Powell, then head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who felt that the military would lose control of a strategic asset if all imagery was controlled by an intelligence agency outside the Pentagon. Finally, in 1996, Congress, the CIA, and the Department of Defense agreed to create the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. As the Department of Homeland Security would do eight years later (with far less success), the new agency combined offices and agencies spread across the government and the military. The largest were the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center, which President Eisenhower created in the 1950s to manage the photos taken by U-2 spy planes, and the Defense Mapping Agency, which was formed in 1972 during the Vietnam War. Also folded in were all the imagery-related units of the DIA, the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Program, and the NRO. In 2003, the NGA was formally brought into the IC as a combat support unit of the Pentagon.