When I was named the Assistant Director for the FBI’s brand new Directorate of Intelligence in the years immediately following 9/11, I have to confess my knowledge of formal intelligence analysis and exploitation processes was limited — and I wasn’t alone.
The “baptism by fire” that I and others in the Bureau experienced was intense and eye-opening. The lessons were terrifically valuable, however, and formed many of the insights that I use today as a private consultant to a number of companies with innovative solutions attractive to the law enforcement and intelligence communities.
In 2004, when the Directorate was created, widespread commercial use of the Internet was only about ten years old. But one key lesson impressed upon me was already becoming apparent: the FBI, and society at large, was woefully unprepared to ingest, store, and manage the tidal wave of digital data being generated by the Internet and rapidly increasing compute power and availability.
That was then and this is now, when every few years more data is generated than has ever existed before in history. This creates an amazing rolling challenge for government agencies at every level, as well as businesses in the heat of commerce, to optimally function in an information saturated world.
Turning raw data into useful information that then can be exploited for intelligence — needed for prudent decision-making — is the age-old goal of every entity that makes our world go round. In the past twenty five plus years, however, the raw data that triggers this process has moved from filling a backyard pool to filling something akin to the Pacific Ocean.
How, then, can you be sure that you are getting the intelligence you need, when you need it, as data sources have become overwhelming? I’m not sure a greater challenge has emerged in the past quarter century.
This lesson was a core reason I was pleased to join Kaseware as an advisory board member. In a sense, Kaseware can trace its genesis back to the FBI’s struggles to adapt to the digitization of data in the early 2000s.
The FBI owns one of the most complex IT landscapes in all of government, juggling a highly dispersed workforce collecting a fire hose of classified and unclassified information ranging from text to voice to images — all of which demands rapid sharing abilities while meeting stringent legal custody requirements. Oh, and some of the information literally pertains to matters of life and death. The result was an onerous kluge of multiple domains, systems, and networks.
It is small wonder that the Bureau struggled early on to implement a modernized IT management system that would serve its vital investigative mission. Iconic companies failed to deliver on expensive contracts in that chaotic environment. Things only began to smooth out when a couple of innovative FBI Agents with a particular set of technical skills took steps to implement changes that fit within the FBI’s tangled IT realm.
The vision and approach of those talented Agents worked. They then went on to start up Kaseware.
Kaseware is all about recognizing the daunting data management challenges everyone faces today and bringing a solution to the table that helps capture and organize an avalanche of information so that it can be visualized, shared, and managed. When that happens well, vital intelligence needed for timely decisions improves dramatically. The cracks that information used to fall through get narrowed and patched.
Every agency and business across the public and private sectors has a set of requirements that must be met in order to be successful. Managing the response to those requirements is a daily, daunting pursuit in today’s data convulsed world. Government and private entities across the globe have turned to Kaseware to bring order to the process.
I am proud to be associated with Kaseware’s important contributions to this fundamental and immense challenge of the past few decades.
Kevin R. Brock is a former Assistant Director of Intelligence for the FBI and Principal Deputy Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). He independently consults with private companies and public-safety agencies on strategic mission technologies.