Remarks by Jim Judd, Director of CSIS, at the Global Futures Forum Conference in Vancouver

2008-04-15

I want to speak briefly this morning to the subject of change in the intelligence community, its drivers, and some of the implications of these changes.

My perspective is not that of a seasoned intelligence professional but, rather, one of someone who has spent only the last few years in the “business” but, before that, in a variety of other different public sector positions.

Therefore, this will be a kind of insider-outsider perspective so those of you with much more experience than I in this domain should feel completely unconstrained in taking either exception or umbrage to what I have to say this morning.

For the purposes of generating some broader discussion here about these issues that is nevertheless not a bad outcome.

In any event, if I do misstep we can always chalk that up as yet another “failure of intelligence”.

Let me start with a basic proposition that it seems to me that the intelligence community – at least those parts of it that I am most familiar with – that is to say largely in the “Western world” – has been undergoing a pretty substantial amount of change in the last decade.

That appears to be especially true in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks which seemed to represent for many governments a major point of departure in re-assessing – in the broadest possible terms – their overall capacities to address national security threats.

Some of these changes and the underlying drivers behind them have been relatively specific to the community itself or to its “business environment” if you will.

On the other hand, some of the changes and their impulses have been at play more broadly in the world and have been brought to bear against any number of public or private sector institutions in the industrialized world and beyond.

In a number of instances, this transformative process is still very much a work in progress as individuals and institutions try – or, in some cases, do not try – to implement or manage change agendas or to deal with their consequences whether intended or not.

Given the origins of the Global Futures Forum, let me adopt the approach of that great American philosopher, David Letterman, and provide my list of the top 10 changes that appear to have been especially significant.

1. Legal Regime:

In many Western (and other) jurisdictions, domestic legal frameworks in the national security area have been significantly modified and, in some cases, continue to be adapted and modified to this day.

That has been replicated, to a large extent, at the broader multilateral level, as well and particularly so through actions of the United Nations.

The changes in legal regimes – whether implemented or proposed or repealed – have also generated a vigorous and fundamental public debate over many of these issues, the likes of which has not been seen for decades. Much of that debate has centered on finding the appropriate balance between security and rights, especially as regards terrorism-related legislation.

A related issue is what some have termed the “judicialization” of intelligence.

One of the consequences of recent trends in anti-terrorism actions has been a growing number of criminal prosecutions that have often had at their genesis, information collected by intelligence and not law enforcement agencies.

This in turn has increasingly drawn intelligence agencies in some jurisdictions into some interesting and important debates on a range of legal issues such as disclosure, evidentiary standards, and the testimony of intelligence personnel in criminal prosecutions.

While not startling or novel issues for the legal or police communities, these do have significant potential implications and consequences for the conduct of intelligence operations. In some instances, they have also stimulated some interesting debates over the boundary lines between law enforcement agencies and intelligence services.

As is often the case in public policy, the changes in legislation emerged after the problem – in this instance the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It does therefore raise the issue as to whether or not existing legislative regimes are still current – especially to keep up with the rapidly and incessantly changing realm of telecommunications and other technologies.

2. Policy Framework:

At the policy level, there has been an equally interesting change, in my view, to the degree that a number of Western governments have explicitly expanded the traditionally defined arena of national security interests.

Historically, it seems that traditionally defined national security issues tended to be confined to what might be called the “usual suspects” of war and peace, espionage and terrorism, and proliferation.

In the last several years, however, we have seen national security strategies and policies emanating from a number of Western governments – my own and, most recently, the United Kingdom – that have re-defined and broadened that playing field.

We have now had added – very appropriately in my view – to the national security menu – a range of other issues including:

1. Natural disasters
2. Catastrophic health issues
3. Environmental degradation
4. Resource competition and depletion
5. Climate change
6. International organized crime
7. Failed and failing states
8. National and international governance issues and others.

To add to that, the recently published British national security strategy went on to complicate this even further – but again very appropriately from my perspective – by delving into underlying global trends and causal factors that may be underpinning the more broadly defined security agenda.

Thomas Homer-Dixon’s presentation certainly did a marvelous job of setting out the nature of this agenda, the inter-connectivity of many of these issues, and the challenges of responding to them in a timely and coherent fashion.

As interesting and relevant as this broadening of the national security agenda is, it does, I think, beg the question as to where and how the intelligence community plays on these issues in a meaningful way. Does this new agenda represent a new “market” for the intelligence community or are there instead niches of that market that should be the focus of intelligence services?

My own disposition is towards the latter, as the scope and complexity of the new broader national security agenda are simply too large for intelligence services and even, I would suggest, for some governments at times. The intelligence community has to be alive to all of these issues obviously, but in so many of them the core expertise and the tools to address them are found elsewhere in governments.

3. Managing Growth:

Almost two decades ago, many around the world were celebrating the end of the Cold War and with it the “end of history” and the birth of a “new international order”.

In recognition of that historical turning point, many governments marked the occasion through substantial downsizing of defence, security and intelligence capabilities, a phenomenon that continued throughout the 1990s.

Little more than a decade later – in the wake of 9/11 – ten years of more or less steady down sizing was replaced by successive years of substantial growth in the resources devoted to intelligence services and security organizations of all kinds.

While obviously welcome news for those managing these organizations, it has also given them enormous management challenges as they struggle to recruit new staff, acquire new technologies, and simultaneously meet new demands from clients.

The question obviously arises though in this new era of growth as to whether the re-building of intelligence capacity is based on the right understanding of the changing environment in which we find ourselves, and which appears destined to continue evolving in the future.

Some have talked about the post-Cold War period as a “paradigm shift” that is still unfolding before us. That in turn begs the question as to whether our investment decisions today are keeping pace with that “paradigm shift” or whether we are constructing the new best Maginot Line ever devised.

4. Demography:

Interestingly, the effective management of this growth has been substantially complicated by the impact of demography on these agencies as Baby Boom generation employees started to take their retirement almost coincidentally with the new investments in intelligence capacity.

As a consequence of the combined impact of growth and demography, intelligence and security agencies now have very young and relatively very inexperienced work forces – certainly relative to past circumstances. The workforces are also more diverse than they ever were in the past, one of the very positive aspects of the generational change in my view.

Several years ago, in a discussion with a number of my foreign colleagues, I mentioned my concern over the risks that this demographic shift might represent for my own organization. It was only mildly comforting to be told by colleagues that, in fact, their demographic shifts were even more pronounced than in my own organization.

So far, however, the infusion of youth - albeit relatively inexperienced - does seem to be working well given the quality of the newcomers in terms of their education, technological skills, dedication, imagination, and new perspectives.

That said, the loss of decades of experience with the departure of the Baby Boomers is something we have to cope with in terms of ensuring knowledge transfer between the generations and the efficacy of our training and development programs for new recruits.

And we are also going to have to adjust to the new generation – as is true with most other private and public sector employers – because Gen X and Gen Y are different, one from the other, and both from those that preceded them. There will have to be a degree of mutual learning and education as we continue to adjust to our rejuvenated organizations.

5. Organizational Transformation:

In the last seven years or less, many Western governments have made a series of structural and organizational changes to their national security apparatus designed to:

1. improve overall coordination and direction; and
2. promote greater collaboration and cohesion both within and among national agencies.

The result has been a rash of institutional “marriages” – some the result of shotgun weddings.

Much of this re-engineering was done to respond to the concern that there was too much institutional competition among agencies within the same government – the often cited stovepipe problem that saw information and intelligence too often hoarded and not shared.

As a consequence of various re-structuring efforts on the community, we now have new national security councils, new national security advisors, new amalgamated security departments, new joint ventures of all kinds (often at different levels of jurisdiction), new intelligence fusion centres and new joint operational ventures.

Much of this, quite frankly, is still a work in progress – as always it is easier to move boxes on organigrams than it is to change organizational cultures and entrenched practices and traditions in institutions with long histories. Design is easy, delivery is often far less so.

In addition to the re-structuring with government machinery, there has been a related push to develop better international collaboration between national institutions in recognition of the fundamentally globalized nature of so many of the issues we deal with on a daily basis.

In our case, while our organization’s principal mandate is domestic, there is virtually no issue with which we are dealing these days that does not have some international dimension to it.

6. New players:

In addition to the recent expansion of organizations and changes in processes within the intelligence community, there appears to have been a marked growth in the non-governmental world of security and intelligence.

Private sector companies have moved into the field in a number of ways – from the provision of private security functions of all kinds, to new intelligence operations (many created and now run by former members of the public sector communities).

Academia has similarly extended its interest into this domain in an unprecedented fashion while the mass media has also followed suit given the higher levels of public interest in national security questions.

More voices, more expertise, more opinions – often with well-established credibility – now compete more than ever in an arena that has traditionally been the purview of governments. And most of them do so without the constraints we face in our own public communications efforts – such as they may be.

That said, I regard this as a good thing for the most part because it opens us up to challenge and gives the opportunity to acquire new and less constrained perspectives and opinions on many of the issues that we deal with on a daily basis.

This conference is one good example of the kind of interaction that should be encouraged. Others with much more experience in this field tell me that a conference such as this one would have been inconceivable a decade ago.

7. Transparency and Secrecy:

This has got to be the decade that the spies came in from the cold – whether voluntarily or kicking and screaming.

More now must be known publicly about the world of intelligence than ever before; the relative levels of transparency must be at an historical high these days.

Much of the dropping of the veil of secrecy has been forced on the intelligence community through a variety of mechanisms including:

1. public inquiries, court proceedings, or the reporting of oversight and review bodies of all kinds;
2. more aggressive media reporting; and
3. greater use of freedom of information or access to information provisions.

But to be fair, some of the growing transparency has been motivated by other more noble factors including a desire on the part of governments to respond to greater levels of public concern and interest in national security issues.

As a result, we have had more active communications and outreach efforts by many intelligence and security services; more public speeches and; more effort to engage different constituencies in new and different ways.

Thus we have seen here in Canada and, more recently in the United Kingdom, the first ever publication of national security strategies by governments, something else that would have been hard to imagine in other times. We also now can delight in knowing who James Bond would have worked for - had he actually existed - now that the existence of MI-6 has been publicly acknowledged.

Much of this move towards greater transparency has much to commend it but it does raise the issue – which I suspect we will face more and more in the future – as to what is legitimately secret and what is not. It is quite likely, I think, that the more information that goes into the public domain the greater will be the pressure to make even more known, in the process calling into question the legitimacy of secrecy.

8. Information Tsunami:

I suspect that the intelligence community has seen a relative information tsunami in the course of this decade as the amount of information available to it has risen exponentially. It is not just the volume that has grown but the variety of it as well.

Part of this has been a function of more active covert collection by intelligence agencies – a by-product of their recent growth and the urgency of the issues with which they deal on a day to day basis.

Another driver has been the growth in information-sharing between national agencies within individual governments as stovepipes crack. And, of course, this has been replicated at the international level spurred on by the reality of new technology and the increased mobility of individuals around the world.

Most of this covert collection has been overwhelmed by the explosion of public source information that is increasingly another and critical focus of intelligence agencies. The Internet has certainly been a prime contributor to this new flood but certainly not the only one as new multilingual global media networks and new media outlets have proliferated in the last decade or more.

Not only has the volume of information grown dramatically but so has the speed with which it is disseminated information has become both instantaneous and ceaseless.

All that said, I am not at all sure that the proverbial wheat to chaff ratio that has always challenged intelligence analysis has improved in the process. As someone once pointed out, the Internet treats both idiots and savants indiscriminately.

9. Technology:

There are three quick points I would make on the technology front and specifically the issues it poses for the intelligence community.

I have already referred to the information boom as a daunting analytical or digestive issue – but that is only a part of the challenge we face.

The other is hardware and software parts of the equation – i.e. how do we effectively and efficiently store, retrieve, and cross-connect the volume of information that is coming in to our agencies?

Historically, the creation and management of user-friendly and effective information management systems have not been a hallmark of excellence for public sector organizations – or even for many private sector ones as well. Systems are expensive, often long in development and subject to an ever evolving technological environment.

The second dimension about technology has already been acknowledged here and that is the heightened level of destructive power increasingly available to individuals and small groups. What had hitherto been largely a capacity of governments has now been “popularized”, if you will, to an extent that is sometimes astonishing and one that has likely not yet run its course.

Finally, I have been struck by the degree to which some other technologies are also now so readily available. Satellite imagery can be obtained through Google Earth or any number of other private sector suppliers of high-quality information. Similarly, encryption devices and systems for communications are of such a quality as to bedevil the interception efforts of governments. All in all there has been, and will likely continue to be, a growing level of technology that again had largely been restricted to governments.

10. Credibility and Legitimacy:

The last several decades have seen a steady increase in what some have referred to as the “deference deficit” vis-à-vis institutions – public, private, and voluntary. Public trust and confidence in these has been steadily in decline and the intelligence community has certainly not been exempt from this trend.

In fact, it may be that the intelligence community has been more subject to this trend than many other public institutions. It is, after all, according to one of my former foreign colleagues, a business that is too often better known for its failures than its successes.

While all will acknowledge that risk is inevitable and that, to paraphrase the recent British national security policy, “shocks will happen”, there seems sometimes to be a different standard applied to the intelligence community.

“Intelligence failure” has become a commonplace phrase to apply to almost any act of commission or omission that is attributed to the community.

It also seems that there is far too often a view held by our clients and others that we are expected to know everything about everything, including the unknowable.

It does occasionally make one wonder whether the standards against which we are judged are as rigorous with other institutions.

All that notwithstanding, my basic point is that the balancing of risks and expectations and performance is likely to continue to be a major challenge for many of us.

Conclusions:

I just have a few comments by way of conclusion.

First, as others have pointed out in this conference, we are still dealing with a paradigm shift in which the environment wherein we function continues to evolve, whether nationally or globally.

Second, I think (or perhaps hope) that many would agree with me that we have a community that is facing a significant set of challenges in adapting to a range of changes that have been launched in some way or other over the course of this decade. This transition is still very much a work in progress.

The key question for all of us though is whether we are succeeding in matching the institutional changes with our environment. Are these the right changes? Are the transformations happening fast enough? Are we going far enough in changing our organizations and how we do business?

Finally, I would like to leave you with a health advisory: from both a physical and intellectual health perspective, drinking one’s own bathwater is to be discouraged. It is events such as this one that provide us all with the opportunity to avoid doing that through getting new or different perspectives on issues of concern to us all.

So I do hope that these proceedings will continue this week to hopefully stimulate debate and discussion that will carry on after the meetings here end.

Thank you.