How the Intelligence Cycle Works

I’m Eric Garland. Welcome back to Game Theory Today. So, the theme of this channel is news and politics from the intelligence perspective. So, we should cover some of what makes up the intelligence perspective. In fact, in this episode, we’re going to be looking at the absolutely most basic framework of intelligence, the intelligence cycle. Guys, it’s time for some game theory. You know, people throw out these big words, espionage, intelligence, national security, and the average sp person is supposed to oo and ah, and sure, those activities are usually tied to important stuff, but at the end of the day, you have a bunch of nerds doing nerd stuff. So, to help demystify matters of intelligence, I’m going to explain some of our jargon in context.

Because, are you a citizen? Do you care about national security and not being killed by terrorists and keeping peace around the world? Then knowing about intelligence is useful. Are you a nerd and you’d like to do very cool stuff with your nerd superpowers? Then knowing how intelligence works could give you an entree to a fun profession. You know, we make movies about people doing dangerous things, which I’m going to estimate at being less than 1% of intelligence. The more than 99% of necessary work in intelligence involves transcription, spellchecking, alphabetizing, filing stuff in the right place, sitting around in planning meetings, making coffee for planning meetings. It is possible that at some point in the journey, someone may jump out of an airplane, change disguises, and infiltrate a secret facility, but most of the time it’s just nerds.

So, introducing the intelligence cycle. By the end of this video, you will understand the intelligence cycle, the most basic framework for what government or private sector spies do every day. But first, I’m going to ask you to click subscribe, hit the bell so you get notified about new intelligence videos. Hooray. Thank you. Let’s go. The modern intelligence cycle has six or seven phases depending on how you want to define things. For me, the intelligence cycle is direction, collection, processing, analysis, dissemination, and feedback. Or they want some stuff, you get the stuff, you organize the stuff, you think about what you got, you package it up and deliver it, and then the customer tells you how it’s not enough and how you’re probably wrong and you suck.

Now go get us more. Hey, I didn’t tell you that this was a great profession for everyone. really just the most masochistic among us who like it when the better they do at their job, the more they get yelled at because you challenge the customer’s core assumptions, setting the decision maker on a necessary course to correct their operations, meaning you’re trapped in a sysophician cycle of pushing accurate intelligence up the mountain of cognitive bias and till God finally mercifully lets you die. So, let’s break down each step, shall we? Phase one can be either a planning phase or step one itself is figure out what you want to know and why. This can be called direction or formation of key intelligence themes and key intelligence questions or kits and kicks.

Fancy words aside, it’s all the same. What are we doing? What do we want to know? Why do we want to know it? And what might we do once we find out? These are fundamental questions because if you don’t have goals of intelligence defined, then the intelligence collection to come will essentially be nothing more than doom scrolling or killing time with Candy Crush. Merely entertaining, possibly interesting, but nothing necessarily of value. This phase is also known as tasking, telling the spies what it is you want to know. The FBI actually splits this into two phases, requirements and planning and direction. To me, that’s both planning and planning to plan, which I’m going to just call tasking. What do you want to know?

You tell me. And you have a higher chance of getting what you want compared with whether I just have to guess. Now, what does this mean in real life? So, we’re going to do a sample exercise here. Hypothetical. Let’s say we’re Boy Scout troop 1423 from Townsville, Ohio. We have to compete in the box car derby against the Boy Scout troop from Cityberg and Bergen. Now, Troop 1423 doesn’t mess around when it comes to racing cars. So, they establish an intelligence function to improve their chances of winning. They issue direction and tasking to their intel service to answer the following key intelligence themes. Does another troop have a superior design of box car? Does another troop have a superior method of racing?

And then they issue the following key intelligence questions. What materials are used to produce the targets box cars? Do any of the boys parents have backgrounds in engineering, aerospace, product design, or material science? Are the troops training or otherwise rehearsing for the derby? If so, what is their training methodology? Do the other Boy Scout troops have a peer-level intelligence service of their own? This would suggest the need for a counter intelligence service protecting Troop 1423’s operations. Have the other troops assessed their probability of success in the upcoming box car derby? If so, what are their assumptions? Phase two is collection. You go get the stuff. We have the themes and questions.

So, next we get the information that would help fulfill those needs. The more information collected, the better our analysis can be and the more confidence we can have in our assessments. The mission brief is pretty well defined from our customer. They don’t just have general questions about how good the other racers are. They have specific questions about materials. They are concerned about the parents helping out. We’ve got nice specific targets. So hopefully we won’t get yelled at as much as usual by the customer when we’re done. Given the questions so far, we need to ask what categories of intelligence need to be collected. And this will define our operations to come. If you’re getting information from human beings, this is called human intelligence or human for short.

If you need pictures of stuff, you might call it imagery intelligence or imit. If those pictures are way high up and of the planet itself, or if they include a broader form of intelligence about the planet, you might expand that to what’s known as geospatial intelligence or geoint. If you want to collect up someone’s communications, this is known as signals intelligence, sigant, or communications intelligence, comment. A special category is used if the intelligence process is military and you want to get intelligence that really anyone else can get, not just your secret sources. That’s called open- source intelligence or ozant. In the world of competitive intelligence, where I come from, we have different classifications.

We collect from primary sources and secondary sources. In competitive intelligence, a secondary source is a printed document that already exists that can be printed by a computer, PDF, or on paper, what have you. If we’re looking at, for example, the mining industry, there might be a market research report already printed up that makes certain statements about, for example, mining and minerals down in Australia. Primary source collection is where we hypothetically call up Bruce Simpson, an Aussie executive down in Darwin, Australia, and we ask him personally what he thinks about the industry. In competitive intelligence, I always collect secondary intelligence first, then I engage in a super advanced human project in which I go ask the guy.

So, what methodologies should Troop 1423 employ? Well, geospatial intelligence doesn’t seem to be implicated. We probably don’t need synthetic aperture radar of their training grounds unless they’re building those box cars with certain isotopes. I’m not sure we could do too much remote sensing off of satellites. Satellite imagery could be used to collect up the number of cars in the parking lot while they’re training. But getting near real-time data will be tough as the Department of Defense hasn’t partnered with Troop 1423 in some time. So even getting degraded imagery might be tough. We could fly some drones over where the other troops practice and grab the license plates off of cars. Easy and legal.

Let’s keep that one in our pocket. More to the point, Sigant may be hard to come by. The NSA hasn’t had a functional relationship with Troop 1423 since that time. They almost all ended up at the Hague, so tapping their phones might be right out. There’s always a contractor who might install Israeli spyware on mom and dad’s iPhones for comment, but the FBI is getting sick of that stuff, so it’s a heap of trouble. Secondary source intelligence will be of limited value since the local newspaper only reports the results of these races and Boy Scout Troop Boxcard Derby magazine hasn’t done a profile of these teams in years. So folks, this is a human mission through and through. So what will Troop 1423 Intelligence be collecting?

First, obviously they create what’s known as a human inventory. They get a list of every scout competing, all the coaches, and if possible, assemble dossas on the parents. They want to identify the key personnel behind new car designs and race techniques. Now, troop 1423 has Timmy, who used to live in Cesburg and still plays with the kids there. He’s designated as the access agent, who still has a plausible reason to go back to Citiesburg and chat up Chad and Tucker from their troop. Timmy takes point on Citiesburg humid and goes over to Chad’s to play Minecraft. In this first cycle of intel collection, he hits pay dirt. So, on to the next phase. Phase three is processing. Getting the information back to where it can be put into a digestible format.

This has a specific function in military intelligence, whereas in non-classified private competitive intelligence, it’s a lot less formal. Let’s say you have an audio recording of a human target, or maybe you just interviewed the target without audio recording, which might be illegal in certain parts of the United States if you don’t let the other party know about it. Well, what then? somebody has to sit down and make a transcript of what was recorded or at least clarify the audio for exploitation by analysts and decision makers down the line. If we’re talking military intelligence, you could have an audio recording that was derived from signals intelligence. Let’s say it’s an intercepted phone call and let’s say it was in an in a language other than English.

Part of the processing phase would be that a linguist might listen to the recording and do a written translation of what he or she heard. This would probably get checked by other linguists so that they agree that it was what was heard and maybe they talk about what various slang might mean in that language. But at the end of the day, they get a transcript that the unit agrees on. Now, what does this mean for the intrepid spies working the Troop 1423 box car derby dossier? Well, Troop 1423 intel service meets with Timmy after his rendevous in Citiesburg, where he and the gang all played Minecraft. He engaged in what was known as elicitation, the human intelligence methodology of gently encouraging human targets to tell you more about the subject in which you are interested than they otherwise would have.

While talking about this year’s science fair and how much they’re looking forward to swim team in the summer, Timmy expresses excitement about the box car derby and subtly expresses doubt that Troop 1423 will be any good. His targets take the bait and start excitedly expressing how awesome it’s going. Timmy returns from his play date with the following readout. Citiesburg troop 1311 is psyched for this year’s box car derby. A new kid, Zach, just moved to town and joined the troop. They moved from Texas where his mother was an engineer working for Tesla. Zach’s mom has a PhD in material science from Purdue and her specialty is carbon fiber materials design. In fact, they have a 3D printer at their house.

It’s not yet clear what effect this has had on Troop 1311’s chances at this year’s derby, but spirits are high. Troop 1311 is learning a ton and having fun. And that’s all for collection so far. Troop 1423 Intel is continuing to monitor. Phase four here is analysis. Once we have the information, we sit down and determine what it means. Analysis isn’t oneizefits-all. It has to pertain to the kits and kicks established during the direction and tasking phase. Analysts compare the information collected with the needs of the customer and determine whether any of the questions have been answered. Further, analysts need to take a stand on what the implications are, how certain they are of their assessment, and what, if anything, the customer should consider doing.

In the case of Troop 1423 intel, the humid collected is outstanding. It doesn’t answer every question that the customer had, and there will be follow-up, but the work of Timmy, the access agent, is pretty outstanding. He kept his cool and didn’t tip off Citiesburg that he was engaged in human collection. As a result, they shared freely beyond what they otherwise would have discussed. Ultimately, the analysts assess that Troop 1311 is a critical threat to this year’s box derby because they assess with medium confidence that Zach’s mom is designing carbon fiber cars printed at Zach’s house which will be lighter and more stable than the wood designs on which other teams rely. The assessment isn’t high confidence because neither Zach nor his friends disclosed a specific design, nor do we have pictures or other descriptions, but they were clear that work has been done in this area and it should be on display at the upcoming box car derby.

Boom. Total success. Phase five is dissemination. We put the intelligence into a digestible format. It could be a readable document, a PDF. It might be an in-person briefing. It could be a video made in advance. It could even be an interactive group chat here. Troop 1423 does a one-page writeup. Aerial font, big type face, doesn’t waste anybody’s time. They sit down with troop leaders and give them the news. Phase six is feedback and retasking. Before troop 1423 returns to the field to get more human, they get feedback from their customer, troop leadership. This hall of intel is so good, something magical happens. They don’t get yelled at. There’s not much push back. This the story is not one where the other troops have something marginal, a better wood supplier, somebody’s dad is better at woodworking.

No, this is a rupture. Zach’s mom changed the game. And she worked for a company, Tesla, that everybody knows does revolutionary designs. And we even have a description of the advanced technology likely deployed. Nobody has interviewed Zach or his mom yet, but Timmy talked to four separate sources at the Minecraft Playdate who all had the same impression. So, the analysts assessed the situation with medium confidence, which is pretty high as these things go. Troop 1423 leadership has asked for descriptions of the carbon fiber designs, photographs if possible, and critically, the leaders of 1423 are looking into whether they could get a 3D printer and do likewise. Best of all, the leaders of Troop 1423 are confident that they’re operating within the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals code of ethics.

They can’t even be sued for a tort, much less end up at the Hague like that last disaster with those NSA contractors. So, they return to the business of making a faster box car. That’s it. That’s the magical intelligence cycle. Direction and tasking, collection, processing, analysis, dissemination, and feedback. Round and round it goes. And hopefully, we get smarter, not dumber over time. Each one of those phases is its own professional discipline, of course. But that’s it for this episode. What questions do you have? Does this sound like a fun job? Let me know in the comments. And check out my video on all 18 intelligence agencies. It has even more about the different ways to gather intelligence that are out there.

Thanks for spending this time with I’m Eric Garland. Welcome back to Game Theory Today. So, the theme of this channel is news and politics from the intelligence perspective. So, we should cover some of what makes up the intelligence perspective. In fact, in this episode, we’re going to be looking at the absolutely most basic framework of intelligence, the intelligence cycle. Guys, it’s time for some game theory. You know, people throw out these big words, espionage, intelligence, national security, and the average sp person is supposed to oo and ah, and sure, those activities are usually tied to important stuff, but at the end of the day, you have a bunch of nerds doing nerd stuff. So, to help demystify matters of intelligence, I’m going to explain some of our jargon in context.

Because, are you a citizen? Do you care about national security and not being killed by terrorists and keeping peace around the world? Then knowing about intelligence is useful. Are you a nerd and you’d like to do very cool stuff with your nerd superpowers? Then knowing how intelligence works could give you an entree to a fun profession. You know, we make movies about people doing dangerous things, which I’m going to estimate at being less than 1% of intelligence. The more than 99% of necessary work in intelligence involves transcription, spellchecking, alphabetizing, filing stuff in the right place, sitting around in planning meetings, making coffee for planning meetings. It is possible that at some point in the journey, someone may jump out of an airplane, change disguises, and infiltrate a secret facility, but most of the time it’s just nerds.

So, introducing the intelligence cycle. By the end of this video, you will understand the intelligence cycle, the most basic framework for what government or private sector spies do every day. But first, I’m going to ask you to click subscribe, hit the bell so you get notified about new intelligence videos. Hooray. Thank you. Let’s go. The modern intelligence cycle has six or seven phases depending on how you want to define things. For me, the intelligence cycle is direction, collection, processing, analysis, dissemination, and feedback. Or they want some stuff, you get the stuff, you organize the stuff, you think about what you got, you package it up and deliver it, and then the customer tells you how it’s not enough and how you’re probably wrong and you suck.

Now go get us more. Hey, I didn’t tell you that this was a great profession for everyone. really just the most masochistic among us who like it when the better they do at their job, the more they get yelled at because you challenge the customer’s core assumptions, setting the decision maker on a necessary course to correct their operations, meaning you’re trapped in a sysophician cycle of pushing accurate intelligence up the mountain of cognitive bias and till God finally mercifully lets you die. So, let’s break down each step, shall we? Phase one can be either a planning phase or step one itself is figure out what you want to know and why. This can be called direction or formation of key intelligence themes and key intelligence questions or kits and kicks.

Fancy words aside, it’s all the same. What are we doing? What do we want to know? Why do we want to know it? And what might we do once we find out? These are fundamental questions because if you don’t have goals of intelligence defined, then the intelligence collection to come will essentially be nothing more than doom scrolling or killing time with Candy Crush. Merely entertaining, possibly interesting, but nothing necessarily of value. This phase is also known as tasking, telling the spies what it is you want to know. The FBI actually splits this into two phases, requirements and planning and direction. To me, that’s both planning and planning to plan, which I’m going to just call tasking. What do you want to know?

You tell me. And you have a higher chance of getting what you want compared with whether I just have to guess. Now, what does this mean in real life? So, we’re going to do a sample exercise here. Hypothetical. Let’s say we’re Boy Scout troop 1423 from Townsville, Ohio. We have to compete in the box car derby against the Boy Scout troop from Cityberg and Bergen. Now, Troop 1423 doesn’t mess around when it comes to racing cars. So, they establish an intelligence function to improve their chances of winning. They issue direction and tasking to their intel service to answer the following key intelligence themes. Does another troop have a superior design of box car? Does another troop have a superior method of racing?

And then they issue the following key intelligence questions. What materials are used to produce the targets box cars? Do any of the boys parents have backgrounds in engineering, aerospace, product design, or material science? Are the troops training or otherwise rehearsing for the derby? If so, what is their training methodology? Do the other Boy Scout troops have a peer-level intelligence service of their own? This would suggest the need for a counter intelligence service protecting Troop 1423’s operations. Have the other troops assessed their probability of success in the upcoming box car derby? If so, what are their assumptions? Phase two is collection. You go get the stuff. We have the themes and questions.

So, next we get the information that would help fulfill those needs. The more information collected, the better our analysis can be and the more confidence we can have in our assessments. The mission brief is pretty well defined from our customer. They don’t just have general questions about how good the other racers are. They have specific questions about materials. They are concerned about the parents helping out. We’ve got nice specific targets. So hopefully we won’t get yelled at as much as usual by the customer when we’re done. Given the questions so far, we need to ask what categories of intelligence need to be collected. And this will define our operations to come. If you’re getting information from human beings, this is called human intelligence or human for short.

If you need pictures of stuff, you might call it imagery intelligence or imit. If those pictures are way high up and of the planet itself, or if they include a broader form of intelligence about the planet, you might expand that to what’s known as geospatial intelligence or geoint. If you want to collect up someone’s communications, this is known as signals intelligence, sigant, or communications intelligence, comment. A special category is used if the intelligence process is military and you want to get intelligence that really anyone else can get, not just your secret sources. That’s called open- source intelligence or ozant. In the world of competitive intelligence, where I come from, we have different classifications.

We collect from primary sources and secondary sources. In competitive intelligence, a secondary source is a printed document that already exists that can be printed by a computer, PDF, or on paper, what have you. If we’re looking at, for example, the mining industry, there might be a market research report already printed up that makes certain statements about, for example, mining and minerals down in Australia. Primary source collection is where we hypothetically call up Bruce Simpson, an Aussie executive down in Darwin, Australia, and we ask him personally what he thinks about the industry. In competitive intelligence, I always collect secondary intelligence first, then I engage in a super advanced human project in which I go ask the guy.

So, what methodologies should Troop 1423 employ? Well, geospatial intelligence doesn’t seem to be implicated. We probably don’t need synthetic aperture radar of their training grounds unless they’re building those box cars with certain isotopes. I’m not sure we could do too much remote sensing off of satellites. Satellite imagery could be used to collect up the number of cars in the parking lot while they’re training. But getting near real-time data will be tough as the Department of Defense hasn’t partnered with Troop 1423 in some time. So even getting degraded imagery might be tough. We could fly some drones over where the other troops practice and grab the license plates off of cars. Easy and legal.

Let’s keep that one in our pocket. More to the point, Sigant may be hard to come by. The NSA hasn’t had a functional relationship with Troop 1423 since that time. They almost all ended up at the Hague, so tapping their phones might be right out. There’s always a contractor who might install Israeli spyware on mom and dad’s iPhones for comment, but the FBI is getting sick of that stuff, so it’s a heap of trouble. Secondary source intelligence will be of limited value since the local newspaper only reports the results of these races and Boy Scout Troop Boxcard Derby magazine hasn’t done a profile of these teams in years. So folks, this is a human mission through and through. So what will Troop 1423 Intelligence be collecting?

First, obviously they create what’s known as a human inventory. They get a list of every scout competing, all the coaches, and if possible, assemble dossas on the parents. They want to identify the key personnel behind new car designs and race techniques. Now, troop 1423 has Timmy, who used to live in Cesburg and still plays with the kids there. He’s designated as the access agent, who still has a plausible reason to go back to Citiesburg and chat up Chad and Tucker from their troop. Timmy takes point on Citiesburg humid and goes over to Chad’s to play Minecraft. In this first cycle of intel collection, he hits pay dirt. So, on to the next phase. Phase three is processing. Getting the information back to where it can be put into a digestible format.

This has a specific function in military intelligence, whereas in non-classified private competitive intelligence, it’s a lot less formal. Let’s say you have an audio recording of a human target, or maybe you just interviewed the target without audio recording, which might be illegal in certain parts of the United States if you don’t let the other party know about it. Well, what then? somebody has to sit down and make a transcript of what was recorded or at least clarify the audio for exploitation by analysts and decision makers down the line. If we’re talking military intelligence, you could have an audio recording that was derived from signals intelligence. Let’s say it’s an intercepted phone call and let’s say it was in an in a language other than English.

Part of the processing phase would be that a linguist might listen to the recording and do a written translation of what he or she heard. This would probably get checked by other linguists so that they agree that it was what was heard and maybe they talk about what various slang might mean in that language. But at the end of the day, they get a transcript that the unit agrees on. Now, what does this mean for the intrepid spies working the Troop 1423 box car derby dossier? Well, Troop 1423 intel service meets with Timmy after his rendevous in Citiesburg, where he and the gang all played Minecraft. He engaged in what was known as elicitation, the human intelligence methodology of gently encouraging human targets to tell you more about the subject in which you are interested than they otherwise would have.

While talking about this year’s science fair and how much they’re looking forward to swim team in the summer, Timmy expresses excitement about the box car derby and subtly expresses doubt that Troop 1423 will be any good. His targets take the bait and start excitedly expressing how awesome it’s going. Timmy returns from his play date with the following readout. Citiesburg troop 1311 is psyched for this year’s box car derby. A new kid, Zach, just moved to town and joined the troop. They moved from Texas where his mother was an engineer working for Tesla. Zach’s mom has a PhD in material science from Purdue and her specialty is carbon fiber materials design. In fact, they have a 3D printer at their house.

It’s not yet clear what effect this has had on Troop 1311’s chances at this year’s derby, but spirits are high. Troop 1311 is learning a ton and having fun. And that’s all for collection so far. Troop 1423 Intel is continuing to monitor. Phase four here is analysis. Once we have the information, we sit down and determine what it means. Analysis isn’t oneizefits-all. It has to pertain to the kits and kicks established during the direction and tasking phase. Analysts compare the information collected with the needs of the customer and determine whether any of the questions have been answered. Further, analysts need to take a stand on what the implications are, how certain they are of their assessment, and what, if anything, the customer should consider doing.

In the case of Troop 1423 intel, the humid collected is outstanding. It doesn’t answer every question that the customer had, and there will be follow-up, but the work of Timmy, the access agent, is pretty outstanding. He kept his cool and didn’t tip off Citiesburg that he was engaged in human collection. As a result, they shared freely beyond what they otherwise would have discussed. Ultimately, the analysts assess that Troop 1311 is a critical threat to this year’s box derby because they assess with medium confidence that Zach’s mom is designing carbon fiber cars printed at Zach’s house which will be lighter and more stable than the wood designs on which other teams rely. The assessment isn’t high confidence because neither Zach nor his friends disclosed a specific design, nor do we have pictures or other descriptions, but they were clear that work has been done in this area and it should be on display at the upcoming box car derby.

Boom. Total success. Phase five is dissemination. We put the intelligence into a digestible format. It could be a readable document, a PDF. It might be an in-person briefing. It could be a video made in advance. It could even be an interactive group chat here. Troop 1423 does a one-page writeup. Aerial font, big type face, doesn’t waste anybody’s time. They sit down with troop leaders and give them the news. Phase six is feedback and retasking. Before troop 1423 returns to the field to get more human, they get feedback from their customer, troop leadership. This hall of intel is so good, something magical happens. They don’t get yelled at. There’s not much push back. This the story is not one where the other troops have something marginal, a better wood supplier, somebody’s dad is better at woodworking.

No, this is a rupture. Zach’s mom changed the game. And she worked for a company, Tesla, that everybody knows does revolutionary designs. And we even have a description of the advanced technology likely deployed. Nobody has interviewed Zach or his mom yet, but Timmy talked to four separate sources at the Minecraft Playdate who all had the same impression. So, the analysts assessed the situation with medium confidence, which is pretty high as these things go. Troop 1423 leadership has asked for descriptions of the carbon fiber designs, photographs if possible, and critically, the leaders of 1423 are looking into whether they could get a 3D printer and do likewise. Best of all, the leaders of Troop 1423 are confident that they’re operating within the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals code of ethics.

They can’t even be sued for a tort, much less end up at the Hague like that last disaster with those NSA contractors. So, they return to the business of making a faster box car. That’s it. That’s the magical intelligence cycle. Direction and tasking, collection, processing, analysis, dissemination, and feedback. Round and round it goes. And hopefully, we get smarter, not dumber over time. Each one of those phases is its own professional discipline, of course. But that’s it for this episode. What questions do you have? Does this sound like a fun job? Let me know in the comments. And check out my video on all 18 intelligence agencies. It has even more about the different ways to gather intelligence that are out there.

Thanks for spending this time with