007’s Lessons for Modern Intelligence

by Vivian Hagerty

Spectre — the twenty-fourth installment in the James Bond family of wholly unrealistic yet overwhelmingly addictive spy thrillers — may not be so unrealistic after all. Several of the film’s broad themes mimicked what I’d heard the Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, discuss at two intelligence conferences this autumn. I began to wonder if this sexy new “shoot-‘em-up” couldn’t actually teach us something about the challenges the Intelligence Community faces today.

The film’s plot centers around a merger between Britain’s intelligence services MI5 and MI6, comparable to America’s FBI and CIA, respectively. The man behind the merger, a devilish little individual called “C” — played by Andrew Scott, otherwise known as BBC Sherlock’s Moriarty — touts the importance of intelligence gathering via surveillance and signals intelligence (SIGINT), and finds nothing more important than the technologically aided collection of mass information. C finds the “Double-O” program to be antiquated, arguing that there is nothing that a group of highly trained humans can do that big data analytics and big brother surveillance cannot do infinitely better.

As it happens, I had heard this debate back in September at the Kalaris Intelligence Conference, hosted by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The day’s expert panels centered on the importance of intelligence gathering and analysis algorithms, the vast amount of information that the intelligence community is faced with every day, and the ability — or inability — to sift through that information. As one of my colleagues who was at the conference put it, “[b]ig data analytics is essentially a fancy industry term for statistics. Statistics can weed through the massive amounts of data the intelligence community receives, and it can do it quickly.”

In the end, the debate comes down to whether there is place for the human touch with the advent of “big data.” This discussion is inherent in both collection as well as analysis: In terms of collection, many argue that human intelligence (or HUMINT) — the information gathered by operatives and agents on the ground — is outdated. With our increased surveillance capabilities vis-à-vis drones and cyber programs, why risk sending an operative into a combat zone when new technology can gather more raw data? In terms of analysis, why invest in training a cohort of 30 new analysts in language skills and analytic tradecraft when you could just use translation software and an algorithm to determine patterns?

Perhaps I’m biased because I don’t want to be out of a job, but I truly believe that human expertise is still required in order to provide nuanced and value-added analysis to policymakers. Fortunately, I keep some good company in the “humans are still important” camp. James Bond’s boss, M — otherwise known as the talented Ralph Fiennes (just forget he played Voldemort…) — agrees with me, explaining that you can gather intelligence from a drone, determine an individual’s guilt, and subsequently send out another drone to kill them; but, pre-programmed weapons systems cannot make split second decisions right before the moment of truth. Given the distance between the technology’s controller and the target, they often cannot pause and re-evaluate. As M says, “A license to kill is also a license not to kill;” without that singularly human ability to second-guess, re-examine, and perform subtle shifts in analysis, all we have at our disposal is brute force with a blunt object.

Obviously, over the past decade, surveillance and targeting technology has improved beyond anyone’s expectations. Such technology allows for more specificity and nuance, to be sure, yet it will never be able to mimic a human’s decision to put down a gun just before the point of no return.

At Georgetown University in September, Director Clapper, remarked, “the future is about people.” As so many things in this world do, this debate exists on a spectrum; the question is not whether we should stick with the incredible technology we have, or revert back to a “humans only” approach. Rather, it’s about how we move forward and utilize both of these assets to the best of their abilities. It’s about how people can work with big data analytics and technology, as opposed to competing with them.

At the end of the day, we are all still on the same team. Humans created technology, and solving the world’s biggest problems will require harnessing that technology’s power. For that, as well as for intelligence analysis, we still need a human touch.