National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Deputy Director Susan Gordon on Wednesday called for the government and Intelligence Community to prioritize innovation to better confront the broad array of threats the United States faces today.
Adversaries always have access to commonly available things, which means that those in the IC must find ways to be a step ahead, Gordon told The Cipher Brief’s Annual Threat Conference in Sea Island, Georgia. NGA produces geospatial intelligence through the analysis of satellite data and imagery of physical features and activities on Earth. Gordon said the government must urgently tackle the question of how to be innovative when it was “designed, in fact, to not be.”
“What is difficult about innovating in government is that it is not designed for this. It is slow and pedantic,” she said.
“Time is our only competitor right now. We are not making enough headway against time. We improve, we evolve, and it’s not enough to overcome the turn of the world,” Gordon said. “It’s just crushing us. A good idea today is a bad idea tomorrow, and it takes us two weeks to decide if we’re going to do it.”
Public-private partnerships that bolster innovation are essential for the government to successfully operate in a complex threat environment, Gordon told conference attendees. NGA has the data, but private companies can provide the tools necessary to navigate the multispectral deluge of that data and produce insightful intelligence into national security events. “The world is there,” Gordon said, “but commanding that data is a challenge.”
After all, “data is the new black.”
“We can imagine a public-private partnership centered on data,” she said, and NGA will “go down that path.”
Transparency pushes innovation, Gordon told the audience at the Annual Threat Conference. “If we decide to succeed in the open, we can learn for our classified operations,” she said.
For instance, NGA has had a longstanding partnership with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and with help from the Gates Foundation, they put together a map of Nigeria based on satellite imagery and about 2,000 local surveys. This partnership revealed dozens of settlements no one knew existed — and that means when Nigeria distributes vaccines to the public, they will not have to waste money or put lives at risk due to outdated census data.
“You cannot help civilization if you don’t have an understanding of the world around you,” Gordon said.
International cooperation is also essential to pushing forward much-needed innovation, Gordon said, highlighting NGA’s partnership with Germany and 30 other nations to produce the most comprehensive pole-to-pole global Digital Elevation Model in history. This new model provides a wider understanding of the Earth’s terrain.
But the intelligence field has a particularly difficult task, in Gordon’s view. The IC has to change “our notion of secrecy today in order to allow us to provide the type of insights that we need to,” she said. Using and relying on information not prepared for or by itself is a real challenge for the government, Gordon, who spent 25 years with the CIA prior to joining NGA, noted.
“But how do you not pursue that?” she asked, given what capabilities are commercially available. Already, some 90 percent of NGA mapping is done using commercial tech, and cheap commercial imagery could allow for more orbiting sensors and therefore more persistent coverage, despite potential loss in photo resolution. Such real-time updates would allow a comprehensive and searchable dataset of the geospatial landscape.
“I can imagine a world where maps aren’t as interesting as models, where there is a query-able Earth,” Gordon said.
Still, IC professionals need to ask themselves how they will “lend authority to data that isn’t produced for our use” as they prepare their intelligence, she said. But intelligence is about advantage — and that advantage is eroding. “We’re not providing enough,” she said.
The conditions for innovation, according to Gordon, are undertaking ambitious, open-ended changes that require government to let go of at least some of assumptions held to be true that might not necessarily be so, which she called "fixed points."
“I can see great opportunity to restore that advantage, but only if we change some of our fixed points,” she said. Otherwise, “if you are thinking inside the box, that is the only box you can have.”
Mackenzie Weinger (@mweinger) is a national security reporter at The Cipher Brief, and Levi Maxey (@lemax13) is a cyber and technology analyst.
