Searching like an Intelligence Analyst – Part 1

We live immersed in information. They are everywhere. We stumble upon them even when we don’t want to see them. Sometimes they are so many that we feel overwhelmed and disoriented. Should I name two of the main issues that afflict people who are looking for something, I’ll say: information overload and low SNR (signal/noise ratio, I’m obsessed with this term, since it was the most used one when I was finishing my Master’s Degree in Telecommunication Engineering – and of course when I worked with sensors and advanced weapons). Those two as well as the “information pollution/distorsion” and the difficulty of understanding the data (see for example: functional illiteracy). Those are really complex topics, specially the last one: the capability to understand, analyze and manipulate data requires years of serious study and practice, with a multidisciplinary approach: if you’re a medical doctor but you’re not so strong in statistics, you may not properly understand epidemiology of some cases even if you’re strong in understanding the mechanism of a particular disease.
Here we’ll focus on understanding (at a very high level, but with some practical guidance too) how to search, but not before understading a little bit why to search.

This title is absolutely not clickbait: among the various qualifications I had as a military officer, acquired in national and international special training schools, there is “Intelligence Operator” and many others, including NATO Intelligence, OSINT and… well, some other specific stuff I won’t tell here. For some activities I was a mentor and instructor myself. I also led several operations where searching for information was crucial. And we used, produced and exchanged lot of mission-critical and strategic data.

Are you ready to take your ability to search for information to another level?
DISCLAIMER: I can’t provide all the methodology I learned and used, since you can imagine some of the methods are classified. If you’re interested in learning more about NATO intelligence, you can search for the for the NATO Standard Allied Joint Doctrine for Intelligence, Counter-Intelligence and Security “AJP-2” (Unclassified and released to the public), available on NATO official website.

Everything starts with a need

It may seem trivial, but one of the most common issues is the lack of clarity at the beginning. Most people start searching for “something” but they can’t even describe what they’re searching for. Wait, I know you may say: “Of course I don’t know, that’s why I started searching”. Let’s quickly clarify: you may not know the answer yet, but you can’t get the best result just with a random generic roam; it’s like expecting to find one of the best (for us in a specific moment) restaurants in town just wandering, in a random walk without a map. Sure occasionally you may be so lucky to enter the best one just by guessing or after a couple of questions to an accidental passerby, but the more efficient way to find the best place for you is knowing what you’re searching for and trying to acquire information. Are you searching for a steakhouse or are you vegan? Fancy gourmand or the best truck stop eat? If you like travelling, chances are that you already know some useful apps/websites to search restaurants even with a lot of convenient filters, where you can select options and restrict a range (if you go veg, there’s no reason to waste time including all the results from “los 10 mejores restaurantes de carnes“, you’re only increasing the noise: select the vegan options… et voilà, decluttering in a second). Do you think I’m saying something obvious? Think of the last searches you made, if you had specific needs in mind and used some filters (I’m not talking only about search engines on the web, but also in “physical” life).

“Quality of your life depends on quality of your questions.” – no, this is not a course on phylosophy and/or religion, in case you’re interested you can have a look here. The quality of your results may depend (a lot) on the quality of your initial questions, rather than the capability to select and understand the answers. Know thyself (extending: know the person/organization you’re searching information for) and you will know how better and faster perform your searches. Just to be clear: there’s nothing wrong if you live day by day without asking anything, “ignorance is bliss” someone says, but we’re talking about living and searching intentionally. “The unexamined life is not worth living” (as Socrates probably said), but at the same time it’s OK if you “just be” (not to be confounded with what is said in Buddhism, that instead is actually the opposite: searching for the ultimate mindful awareness). If you’re thinking that this post is getting to philosophical, you must know that NATO Intelligence publication (AJP-2) starts literally with a famous quote, that in fact I listened hundreds of time: “Sun Tzu stated that if ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril“, because getting and using information is not just a matter of tools and how good you are in using them, it’s more about deep reasoning. And if you’re thinking I’m going too far, this is an issue: intentional life and deliberate search, study and practice are intimately connected with the quality of one’s life.

“What I am searching for?” is absolutely not a trivial question. If you think otherwise, try to find an answer to “what I really search when I want to be calm or happy?” or “what I really want to be, precisely, 3 years from now?”. Obviously, the difficulty is highly related to the abstraction and the vastity of a topic and how many interconnected complex information we’re searching for. One thing is to ask “When did the french revolution happen?” and another is “What is the current Chinese geopolitical situation?”. But, at the core, there’s the same way of thinking, the same methodology, only much easier in the first case. The result is always the same: reducing an informational gap, to reduce the grade of uncertainity in something we’re insterested in. If you read my previous posts, now it will be clear for you the data-driven approach I used when I choose to change my life.

It’s a matter of resources

Coming back to the example of the kind of restaurant we’re looking for, everyone is aware that we have lot of constraints: if it’s 6PM and we want to put something in our teeth for the next dinner, we can’t ask every single person around us, for several reasons (well, the complexity here is going up since, like in real cases in intelligence, we may want to be discrete in our search or they can provide us wrong or deliberately false information, like sending us to some restaurant they get money from, but for the moment let’s assume everone is a honest friend). We’re short in time and some information are available only to a closed circle of friends (like getting info on where to find a real geisha if you’re just an occasional traveler in Japan). That’s why in intelligence there’s a big distinction in types of information you can obtain, for example white or gray literature: the first one is what is easily accessible to everyone, like some info published on the clear web, the latter is something a little bit harder to access, like getting the menu from a restaurant that have it only in printed version available when you sit on a table. I really want to stress out again on time: we have a lot of information, but we don’t have a lifetime to read and process it. Forget the imagery of movies in which an investigator reads every possible detail for days: yes, there are also similar cases, but I have also experienced cases in which I needed information (for myself or for my superiors or allies) in less than 10 minutes. And in that case, it is essential to already have several weeks (or rather years) of preparation and experience, on where and how to look.

It’s also important to highlight that there’s a big difference between basic intelligence (usually used as reference material for planning and as a basis for processing subsequent information or intelligence, like the name suggest: as a base point to start) and current intelligence (that reflects the current situation at either strategic or tactical level, normally a time sensitive snapshot, “perishable”): basic intelligence for the restaurant is knowing that it’s a fish restaurant established 20 years ago in town, current intelligence is more knowing about the current chef and the dish of the day.
There are also different levels of intelligence, from top to bottom: strategic (really high level), operational (conducting a single operation), and tactical (our research for the restaurant falls in this category). And there are also several “collection disciplines”, each one specialized in specific fields, e.g.: acoustic, imagery, signals – expertize in each field add a specific “flavour” and skillset, but the basics remain the same. There are a couple of them more famous than others: HUMINT (human intelligence) and OSINT (open source intelligence). You can find the first one in almost every fictional (but sometimes also biographical) book/movie for the general public, where the secret agent get info from humans (hence, the name). The other one is becoming more and more popular among those who work in the “computer world”, but let me state it clearly: no, just because you are capable of clicking on a web browser icon on a screen and type a few words on a popular search engines doesn’t make you an OSINT operator/analyst. Just like being able to produce a sandwich doesn’t make you a successful manager of a 3-stars Michelin restaurant.

The importance of the source

In this post opening, I mentioned few of the big issues in this information era. Not all the data are the same and not all the sources are the same. Sources, in NATO intelligence framework, are rated from A (completely reliable) to E (unreliable) and F (reliability cannot be judged); credibility of the information has a rank from 1 (confirmed by other sources) to 6 (truth cannot be judged). Important here: “usually” a good (reliable) source can provide good (credible) information, but it’s not always the case (same, but on the contrary, for bad sources – and I’m not even taking into consideration the case in which a source knows that we consider it bad and so try to deceive us, guessing we’ll assume it’s a lie. I know, it’s a complex world). Coming back to our restaurant affair: you completely trust your best friend, for you an “A” source and you ask him about a restaurant to try. You generally expect from your friends that they’ll provide you the best/credible information (rating: 1), but take your time to double check, because even if your friend is generally reliable as a source, he can suggest you the “wrong” restaurant for a series of reasons, like: mistaking one restaurant name with another one, having different taste and just said “it’s good!” (but maybe it’s a steakhouse and you’re vegan), associating the memory of the restaurant with something pleasant and good company (so not actually paying attention to the restaurant itself), assumed drugs that day (so a vague/blurred memory), and so on. If you can double check the information, do it (you may know that fact checking is something a bit hard, sometimes). Of course, it’s a matter on how much is at stake: if I tell you that a restaurant is good and you discover that it’s not what you thought, you’ll ruin part of your evening, but if you trust me that “Living here is fantastic, quit your job and bring your family here!” without making more research on my place, wel… consequences can be slightly different and more “persistent”. Real example: when I had to search for a specific threat, I didn’t stop at the first source, so I quickly tried to double check the information I got from our allies and then enriched it with other details. This is true both for situational awareness and for operations on a specific target.

There’s something else outside

This will be a really quick one: maybe obvious for most of us, but we live in a bubble. Also, we are sometimes limited (most of the times, by our laziness) and trapped into a filter bubble.
When you’re searching for some information, specially for serious and “global” ones, please keep in mind that we’re living in a certain part of the world, interacting most of the time with people from “our side” and our point of view, using same tools and accessing same information. Just remember that sometimes you may want to go a little bit outside (phisically or virtually) to search and try to obtain more.

Time to make order

Well, you got all the info you think you need (in case of huge complexity, it’s much more likely you reached a time limit fixed by a real deadline or by your “personal common sense”). And now? How to use that small piece of information or the big quantity of data you collected?

Again, before taking into account all the (too many) available tools, it’s important to have clarity in mind, know – at a high level – the processes. Otehrwise, you’ll probably ending up drowned under pieces of paper (or digital files).

I will not enter here in definitions and details abdout “data”, “information”, “intelligence” (you guess it: they’re NOT synonyms), but basically you must know that unprocessed data may be used in the production of intelligence. Simply knowing data, without any context, isn’t so much useful: if you retrieved the raw number “42” associated to the restaurant you’re going to, it’s not that useful as knowing that every 42 minutes the waitress will kill a client; even more useful if you found that this waitress is a vegan extreme activist, so probably she will kill only clients eating meat. And then you can also “disseminate” (yes, this is the technical term) your intelligence to your friends, so they can use it in an “actionable” way, avoiding that restaurant (or getting a risk but at least don’t order meat). After that, you can now modify your “direction” in your search, since you know you want to exclude something and searching for other places. Compliment! You just followed “the intelligence cycle”:

The specific information requirements (and the related priority), as I wrote before, can be something you proactively search or dictated by sudden circumstances, but now you know how to think as an intelligence analyst.