Just weeks before Edward Snowden put contractors with access to classified information in the spotlight, Intelligence Community leaders were citing the need for commercial research and development to improve intelligence efforts.
Due to ongoing financial limitations on research and development spending, the intelligence community is looking more than ever for commercial companies to provide necessary research and development, rather than its traditional approach of using defense contractors.
The intelligence community will soon begin working with the private industry on the development of key technologies said Dawn Meyerriecks, the outgoing assistant director of national intelligence for acquisition, technology and facilities in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), in an interview with AFCEA’s Signal Magazine.
“We can’t do this ourselves,” she said. “We don’t have a choice.” One area where Meyerriecks sees industry helping is human language translation. “We don’t have to build all the language translation capability in the planet—lots of people are doing that,” she said.
Other unclassified areas she sees as priorities for public collaboration are exploitation, video and motion imagery, big data, trust in software and platforms, networks and high-performance computing. For adapt/adopt technologies, she notes cloud computing, visualization, cognitive systems and knowledge management are needed.
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), which conducts research that complements commercial efforts, is “a great bellwether of what it is we are investing in as a community,” Meyerriecks said. A total of 34 out of its 38 programs are unclassified and in one particular unclassified initiative, only 17 of the 70 principal investigators are U.S. citizens, reflecting the global nature of the research.
The move toward the commercial sector should’ve happened earlier, said Meyerriecks. IARPA has 1,200 relationships with universities and the intelligence industry is less constrained by security restrictions, and its researchers think differently about solving problems than do their counterparts in government, Meyerriecks offers.
It makes sense that the federal would turn toward commercial space, said Peter Singer, director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution.
“One of the major shifts is how the civilian side is accelerating not just ahead, but in some case well past the innovation from the traditional firms,” he said. “And a large part of that is due to a business model that looks at risk as not something to be pushed on the government, but part of the very act of being in business.”
Whether this effort will survive new scrutiny is to be determined, but the reality is that the IC needs the efforts of private industry, particularly when it comes to research and innovation. The balance between security and rapid acquisition is likely to shift toward security, but when it comes to the types of open-source problems Myerriecks highlighted, the benefits of working with industry are significant, and the risks relatively few.
