Study finds CIA falling behind in IT know-how

IDG News Service - A new unclassified report, titled "Failing to Keep Up With the Information Revolution," offers a withering assessment of the CIA's use of IT for intelligence analysis, calling its networking and information-searching capabilities "primitive" and saying that the agency's emphasis on secrecy fundamentally discourages IT use and adoption by CIA analysts.
The study was conducted by a scholar working with the CIA's Sherman Kent Center for Intelligence Analysis, a think tank attached to the analyst training center in the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence (DI).
The report appeared in the most recent edition of the intelligence-community publication Studies in Intelligence and is posted on the agency's Web site.
The CIA didn't respond to a request for comment, but the report is said to have been circulating widely within the DI since its completion about six months ago, according to Barbara Pace, editor of Studies in Intelligence.
The study's author, Bruce Berkowitz, interviewed almost 100 CIA employees involved in producing national security analysis, including intelligence analysts, technicians and managers. He asked them about their work and use of technology, soliciting their ideas for using IT more effectively, according to the report.
Berkowitz served as scholar in residence at the Sherman Kent Center in 2001 and 2002, the period covered by the study, and is a former CIA employee and currently a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Among other problems, Berkowitz found that CIA analysts must bounce among multiple, isolated systems to gather information, including separate systems on each desk for accessing the CIA's classified network and using the public Internet.
DI agents have no easy way to share classified information with authorized intelligence personnel outside of the CIA or to access information stored in other classified information networks within the government, such as those at the U.S. Department of Defense. "The result is that DI analysts work in an IT environment that is largely isolated from the outside world. If they need to do work that is classified in any way, there is virtually no alternative other than to use the CIA's own, restricted system," the report said.
Contrary to popular depictions of CIA agents using cutting-edge information-gathering technology, Berkowitz found that DI analysts lack access to even the most common information-searching technology for conducting intelligence analysis, such as Web-based search engines. instead, they rely largely on a 1970s-era database called CIRAS, for Corporate Information Retrieval and Storage.
Perhaps the most telling sign of the DI's archaic information-gathering capabilities is the continued importance of DI analysts' "informal source network"