The motto of any intelligence agency can be found in Sun Tzu's famous text, Sūnzí Bīngfá, "Know your enemy ... the outcome of a hundred battles will never be in doubt." In fact, the main objective of any secret service has always been the collection and processing of strategic information in order to gain an advantage over the adversary.
The collection of these data, over the centuries, has been able to evolve with the mutations of the environement. The world around us has developed new technologies that have increasingly become current and of daily use for intelligence activities. Today, 007 of the third millennium, we could define it as a digital agent, whose activity is aimed at analyzing digitized data. Wars, in this new millennium, are information wars, they are fought on computer networks, on the "surface" web or on the deep web, data is collected in encrypted files, but sometimes they are unknowingly accessible to everyone except the use of special precautions.
Today the digital agent uses Human Intelligence, or whistleblowers, uses Sigint - Signal Intelligence - intercepting communications, analyzing and processing Imint (satellite images or other carriers), breaks down and studies chemical, radio and spectrographic traces, or, last but not least, analyzes the Osint - Open Source Intelligence - that is the freely accessible information.
The real turning point of intelligence agencies in the modern and contemporary era is represented by the 11 September 2001: the second great failure of the biggest secret services, the American ones, second only to the attack on Pearl Harbor. At a hard price it was necessary to understand how the global threats represented by the new terrorisms, have assigned a remarkable quid pluris to the value of the data: if before the cardinal point of the intelligence activity was represented by acquiring information, today we are projected more to the power to process, process and extract particular meanings from this information which is freely available. For this reason, the data according to which around 80% of the information useful for an investigation comes from open sources runs in support. This ease of access to data has therefore profoundly changed the way in which the intelligence activity operates: Osint, which in the past represented a support for the way the Services work, now becomes the central information process.
Osint does not focus solely on freely available and free information, but can also address information contained in the structural data base (eg the land register for property surveys). On the other hand, cyberwarfare and Sigint are preparatory to a profound information screening activity. This latter activity is directed towards data of particular importance through the use of intrusion software, Trojan Horses, inserted as attachments in e-mail messages, use of programs for intercepting Internet browsing by cracking network passwords Wi-Fi or the compromise of routers and servers, the use of hardware capable of intercepting network traffic in order to make it visible to the same operators of the same network. In another way it is carried out with attacks defined as "trawlers" with systems for intercepting telephone and satellite traffic such as Echelon, or systems for intercepting Internet traffic through sniffing programs installed in Internet Service Providers such as Carnivore or Prism. Carnivor is a program used in USA networks capable of copying and storing intercepted data on hard disk, while Prism is a program of the National Security Agency that scans live communications and much of the world's internet traffic and information stored as e-mail, chat , videos, photos, file transfers, etc. With all this we must remember how Prism makes use of the collaboration of some of the major service providers. This makes us understand how digital espionage foresees the cohesion of private software houses and the potential to control the Network.
To succeed well in understanding the importance of information for intelligence activity, it is necessary to take a step back and examine the etymological meaning of the word intelligence itself. We can derive it from the Latin intus legere, that is to read inside, thus evoking the search for something that is not outside, it is not self-evident, but it must be sought with a method that can find hidden meanings. Thus, the activity of hiring information is the real key to a correct and positive operation of Secret Service: as the great decision-making scholar Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize for economics in the 2002, said, "we tend to overestimate what we understand of the world and underestimate the role of chance in the events »1. In this sense, the activity of those involved in analysis is crucial, that is what we might call human reducer of the informational complexity, which indicates to the information collector, that is to say who is in charge of the espionage activity, which data deserve an analysis focused on and which may be overlooked.
Today this activity has been misguided on the basis of a thought that the more data is acquired the better: intelligence agents thus store raw data without actually knowing what to do with it; the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other espionage agencies collect bulk data on any of us. Consider that only the NSA takes the equivalent of 580 million cabinets daily. A real IT bulimia that leads to being invaded by data that too often is unable to connect and appreciate it as strategic information for security.
The secret of every intelligence activity is inculturation: as British Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence used to say "if you wear Arab clothes, vestins altogether" 2, to indicate how the best intelligence activity is only the one that from the collected data is capable of generate the real information needed for security. Who is not able to be curiosus and to impersonate the enemy by watching the world with his eyes will never be a good 007.
Today the centrality of the search for information for the secret agent has been lost, this often comes from "friendly" states but these are not always our allies, often a thick blanket of uncertainty remains, as evidenced by the close spying conducted between countries of the same alliance, NATO or EU. The CIA's failures in predicting today's situation in the Middle East are right in this: to entrust itself to Mubarak when he himself would have to say about the fragility of his own Government seems absurd, anyone can understand how this is utopian, and this reliance has made so that the American Agency not only could not find genuine information but, far more serious, failed to extract the data that would perhaps have allowed it to predict those tumults.
From all this we can easily deduce how, if every conflict always has as its trigger a precious asset for which to fight, today this good is represented by data. They are a very peculiar raw material: they are everywhere, both in rich and poor nations, produced by every modern technology and in any kind of interaction, they are not exhausted and are perfectly duplicable and reusable. They are both a raw material and a final product, the more they cross the more they take on value. In order to use the data, as it is for oil, it is necessary to have wells to draw from, pipelines and ships to transport them, centers to store and work them, a distribution network for wholesalers and end users of that precious knowledge that, used in tactical or strategic terms, it generates power 3.
In this sense, the Snowden4 papers have reported how the National Security Agency, also thanks to the infrastructures set up by the Five Eyes5 group and the direct or forced collaboration of other agencies or private companies, collects metadata of phone calls on the fixed and mobile networks of most countries in the world. Metadata means any information that describes the call, such as the number called or the calling number, the place, time, or anything else similar.
The analysis of these metadata, especially those of mobile networks, allows a sort of user tracking that is often more efficient than that achievable by a natural person. In fact, these data give us information about the place where the subject is located, specifying the starting and ending positions of a given route, defining the interlocutors and much more. The metadata of a single user becomes much more interesting when they come to be crossed with those of other subjects. The elements thus worked allow the intelligence to pass from a simple objective analysis of the subject and its relations to a forecast of his behaviors. It goes without saying that the more information there is, the better the final picture will be defined. All this information is collected indiscriminately on the whole population, just think that the ShellTrumpet program, in the 2012, processed two billion call events a day. The NSA, the Gchq other service agencies, do not analyze only the telephone records, but the same content of the conversations. Based on the infrastructures used, these phone calls are scanned in real time thanks to the use of keywords, then stored for further analysis. From the cases Sowden and WikiLeaks emerged as the only Somalget program, activated in the 2009, provided for the recording and storage for thirty days of the total number of calls on the mobile network made in Afghanistan and the Bahamas.
As has already been said, technological development strongly supports this mechanism: the new technological capabilities acquired by the Americans with the completion of the Bluffdale computerized megacenter in the Utah desert, make US infrastructures available at least seven times that of the Pentagon equipped with high-capacity quantum computers.
However, telephone traffic is not the only one that is monitored: IP traffic is also strongly under the cover of secret services. From the documents on the Rampart-A program it emerges that 33 States, including Italy and other 16 members of the European Union, grant the National Security Agency direct access to the fiber optic communication infrastructures present on its territory 6.
The ease of finding information is therefore indisputable: reaching the sensitive data of each of us is made absolutely simple by technology. Consider that, for example, to obtain fingerprints and photographs of a politician, appointments and confidential documents, as well as information on his life, the simplest, cheapest and most efficient way is to access his smartphone, tablet or computer.
To operate a tight control on international communication it is therefore sufficient to access the fiber optic cables of the main international carriers. Also in Italy new probes have been installed in Palermo - at the hub managed by Telecom Italia Sparke commissioned by an important American company - useful for spying on all the voice and data traffic passing on the international Sea-Me-We 47 backbone.
Even the data traffic on the Internet is very simple to intercept: the communications addressing system is built in such a way as to pass most of the traffic packets in the USA, even if we send an e-mail from Turin in Milan. The XKeyscore global interception program works like a big vacuum cleaner. As has already been said, the vast majority of the most useful information for the intelligence activity are stored in extremely easy-to-access sites: think of Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Twitter, which have particularly interesting data since the much of their business is based on profiling users themselves. These therefore have a lot of information already processed and ready for use. In this sense, the campaign undertaken by the US government for some time against the adoption of services and products offered by the Chinese telecommunications giants Huawei and Zte, parts of a clearly anti-US policy, must not be surprised.
If the ease of access to vital information is particularly high for the average user, for intelligence agents it is absolutely ridiculous: a datum demonstrating all this is provided to us, for Italy, by the Copasir which, in one communication to the Attorney General at the Court of Appeal of the Court of Rome communicated how during the 2013 he received and authorized the services only 128 interceptions preventive, a figure absolutely not credible and that makes us think about how intelligence is able to find information also bypassing the ordinary instruments under law.
Another relevant example of how the computerized data is an asset for modern intelligence services is represented by the British agencies, especially one of the three XXUMX, the Gchq, the Metadata Service. The documents disseminated with the NSAgate show how this entity has created IT infrastructures capable of preserving all types of digital data: it is assumed that even the data of users playing online with Angry Birds9 are acquired. What is certain is that the vast majority of web users do not participate in terrorist, espionage or military activities, despite all the material that they, among them, share, is preserved, at least temporarily, because it is capable of hiding pieces of a spy puzzle. The operators of the GCHQ must therefore fathom a sea of data spending energy for a job that often proves useless. An example is provided by the system set up by this intelligence agency for the London G10 of 20. A fake Internet Café was set up to monitor e-mails exchanged between foreign officials and leaders in order to know the positions that the various governments would take at the top. This mission, encouraged by the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his colleagues, was completely superfluous since any journalist or political analyst could have answered these questions.
With this further example we can show how the intelligence activity must not only be based on the data found on the web: surely they represent a strong wealth as well as the possibility of finding links to plans against security, but terrorist designs are not linear processes , paths are not followed by stages until completion of the attack, and often the change of idea on objectives or on weapons to be used, as well as the divergence of different cells of the same group on the strategy to follow, make the situation even more unpredictable. This indeterminacy can also be found in the political leaders, who change their mind and improvise, think of Hitler, who believed he could annex Austria in his Reich without having to use the army but that he soon had to change his mind at the announcement of the plebiscite on the annexation to Germany. To predict the moves of others, in other words to operate the correct intelligence activity, it is not enough to read a dossier but it is necessary to correlate an accurate analysis and operational work on the "old style" field to the traced information.
The point to improve intelligence performance, therefore, is not to increase the capacity for gathering information, but what matters is what happens once the information has been acquired. In other words, what matters is data analysis. Neglecting this element can involve high costs for security: an example is what happened in Bali in the 2002, where the attacks of the Gamā'a al-Islāmiyya group could have been avoided. Australian Defense Minister Dennis Richardson himself admitted that: "the failure consisted in not understanding that after the 1996 Gamā'a al-Islāmiyya had turned into a terrorist group. Until the 2001 this evolution had completely escaped us »11.
If it is true that history must teach us something, in this context it is necessary to take a cue from the German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz who, in the famous treatise Della Guerra, wrote: "Much of the information we receive in war is contradictory, some clearly wrong, the most somewhat dubious. What can be asked of an officer, in these circumstances, is a certain selectivity, which derives solely from the knowledge of men and the context, and from a good capacity for judgment ".
The recent French events are perfectly placed in this analyzed plan: enormous information is collected, the intelligences have properties of numerous data which then, in fact, are not able to analyze and therefore to avoid risks to social security. On Wednesday 7 January, at 11.30, a commando of two people belonging to the Islamic extremist-terrorist area breaks into the editorial office of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo making a massacre: twelve dead and eleven wounded, four of which grave 12. Once the possible authors have been identified by the judicial police unit DRPJ in Paris and analyzing their historical background, it becomes clear that the two subjects, Said Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi, were not new to the public forces. In particular they were in two databases of US security agencies, one the highly confidential Tide, and the other the no-fly list of the Terrorist Screening Center, the TSDB. Even one of the two was known to the Italian police, as emerges from the information given to the Chamber of Deputies by the Interior Minister Angelino Alfano. Indeed it is known that Chérif Kouachi was imprisoned in France for 18 months, from January 2005 to October 2006, for trying to travel to Iraq in order to join a terrorist Islamic cell considered part of the so-called Iraqi supply chain of the 19th arrondissement Paris. The same French justice minister, Christiane Taubira, told the CNN television station that the same individual had also participated in Jihad in Yemen, a region where, in the 2011, the other terrorist, Said Kouachi, went weekly to train with the al-Quaeda militants of Aqap. The 2008 is then condemned by the Chérif to three years in prison for a terrorist association. Very well known subjects.
A failure therefore of the French intelligence services and of the countries that want to fight Islamic terrorism, a new 11 September on the whole line that would surely have been avoided with a deep analysis of the available data, especially taking into account how the same periodical French had been under strict surveillance precisely to safeguard it from possible fundamentalist-terrorist revenge behind publications of vignettes having as subject Muhammad or Islam in general, a will that derived from a concrete danger re-enacted by the 2011 attack in which a bomb right inside the offices of Charlie Hebdo. The attack consumed a few days ago is not comparable to contemporary terrorist attacks such as that of 15 December 2014 in Sydney, in which three people were killed after a hostage activity in the Lindt Chocolate Café; or of Ottawa, of the 22 October 2014, or New York, of the following day. In all these cases, the attacks were random, untargeted and premeditated, as seen in the case of the French periodical. A sort, therefore, of punitive commando organized in the face of an accused facing the Prophet Muhammad - as demonstrated by the cry, heard in the audio and video recordings, Allah akbar - an action probably avoidable with an adequate and accurate intelligence planning based on to the analysis of the abundant information available. Also from this recent case we note that the massive and copious amount of information that intelligence collects as much as an in-depth analysis of this mass is not so important, acting as informed agents also drawing inspiration from any statements that alleged terrorists could make - as usually happens - on social networks, therefore, acting as a secret agent.
Nicolò Giordana
(photo: opening frame from the movie "Skyfall")
1D. Kahneman, Thinking, fast and slow, Farrar, New York, 2011, p. 14.
2T.E. Lawrence, Twenty seven articles, 4, Praetorian press, 2011.
3 F. Vitali, The black gold of data, in Limes Italian magazine of Geopolitics, July 2014, p. 30.
4 Edward Snowden, head of the NSAgate, former agent of the National Security Agency author of the dissemination of the methods used by the US Agency.
5 Group born from the Uk-US agreement of 1946 among the electronic intelligence agencies of the United States, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and New Zealand. This alliance would provide for an understanding of non-espionage with each other but, in reality, there are clauses that admit exceptions, an example is provided by the draft of a directive of the director of the NSA dated 2005 and revealed with the NSAgate from which it emerged as in certain circumstances it was advisable and permissible to spy on friends even when it was in the best interest of the USA.
6R. Gallagher, How secret partner expand NSA's surveillance dragnet, in The Intercept, 18.6.2014.
7 See Exclusive. New Sicilian probes "spiano" Europe and MO, in SiciliaInformazioni, 7.11.2013.
8 Vitali, cit., P. 35.
9 The first is MI5, in charge of internal services, then MI6, for external services, and Gchq.
10 T. Van Dongen, If James Bond has no doubts London is in danger, in Limes Italian Geopolitical Magazine, July 2014, p. 98.
11 Van Dongen, cit., P. 101.
12 See the press conference of the Paris prosecutor François Molins in Police explains the dynamics of the Paris attack, in www.internazionale.it
