Watching your actions

Intelligence analysis is often described as “trying to find a needle in a haystack,” but it’s a much harder problem than that. The idea of finding a needle in a haystack makes several assumptions:

• There is a needle in the haystack
• There is exactly one needle in the haystack
• You’re looking in the right haystack
• You know the needle when you see it
• A needle is what is supposed to be found

In this analogy, the analyst knows what to look for and where to look for it. Improving intelligence performance, then, is a matter of doing things faster. In practice, intelligence analysts are rarely presented with such textbook problems. The analogy is more like finding hay in a stack of hay. It goes something like this:

• I’ve got all this hay, and it is in a stack
• This piece of hay looks unusual; it is bent funny
• And it’s located right next to this other piece of hay that is perfectly straight
• And most of the hay looks straight – is that normal?
• And over there is one piece of hay that is blue
• By the way, there are ten other stacks of hay there, there and there

This is a much harder problem because the analyst doesn’t know what he or she is looking for, or even where to be looking. Solving hard intelligence problems requires a new perspective, a new methodology, and new tools.

Activity-Based Intelligence (ABI), a new paradigm for analyzing hard intelligence problems, was defined by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence as “a discipline of intelligence where the analysis and subsequent collection is focused on activity and transactions associated with an entity, population, or area of interest.” ABI is a methodology for intelligence analysis when you don’t have obvious signatures like a needle.

In other words, it’s a shift of focus from analysis of locations to analysis of individuals and how they act.

Activity-based intelligence analysts discover abnormal observations, trends and patterns by correlating multiple sources of information together in space and time. ABI analysts call this principle “georeference to discover.” When multiple things happen in the same place and time, we may have discovered something interesting – or at the very least, a place worthy of further investigation.

The ABI approach extends the concept of a georeferenced place across the haystacks of geospace, time, cyber and even the human dimension to discover interesting activities and events.

Finding unusual hay in a stack of otherwise normal hay requires curiosity, creativity and cultural awareness. At BAE Systems, we employ ABI analysts skilled in the craft of critical thinking and reasoning. They are trained to question everything and try multiple hypotheses. They understand the culture of those they are analyzing so they can tell if particular activities are abnormal or just unfamiliar.

Analysts aren’t trying to find hay in the haystack. They are trying to explain why it’s there, what that means, and anticipate what may happen.
 

For decades, analysts have been using imagery to identify fighter jets at an airfield and infer activity – but this is not “ABI.” Increasingly persistent, unique, social, and real-time sources collect extreme volumes of information. To avoid drowning in data, analysts need new tools to efficiently navigate the many haystacks and focus their analytic energy.

BAE Systems is developing capabilities to help intelligence analysts filter, correlate, and discover data from multiple sources. Advanced analytic capabilities help analysts find significant data and visualize patterns. They link multiple observations to understand relationships. A visually engaging dynamic interface lets them navigate through many layers of information to quickly understand activity and infer intent. They can publish, share, and collaborate with other analysts to solve the hardest intelligence problems.

BAE Systems provides this real-time intelligence and mission-enabling analytic solutions to support operations across homeland security, law enforcement, defense and intelligence communities. By combining the right analytic capabilities with deep analytic expertise – the ABI tradecraft – BAE Systems provides end-to-end solutions that turn large volumes of data into a strategic intelligence advantage.