An Epistemic Evolution of Intelligence

Philosophy

The perception of intelligence as power has intensified during the Second World War, when several intelligence agencies has been formalized and significantly increased. In all countries, new agencies and departments have been set up to deal with threats. Government publications in developed countries, following the September 11, 2001 attack, reflected a consensus that intelligence services are key to preventing mass attacks, spending huge amounts for the intelligence agencies that are considered a major component of national security systems.
          DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.16398.20809

An Epistemic Evolution of Intelligence Nicolae Sfetcu February 5,2019 Sfetcu, Nicolae, "An Epistemic Evolution of Intelligence", SetThings (February 5,2019), MultiMedia Publishing (ed.), DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.16398.20809, URL = https://www.telework.ro/en/an-epistemic-evolution-of-intelligence/ Email: firstname.lastname@example.com This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visithttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/. Excerpt from: Sfetcu, Nicolae, "Epistemology of Intelligence Agencies", MultiMedia Publishing (2019), DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.12971.49445, ISBN 978-606-033-219-0, URL = https://www.telework.ro/en/ebooks/epistemology-of-intelligence-agencies/ Information is power. Intelligence includes a wide variety of meanings in different contexts, from daily to technical. Stewart believes that the transformation of information into knowledge is a critical one, which is the basis for creating value and competitive advantage for modern activities. (Stewart 2001) The process of intelligence gathering, processing and analyzing is a major concern for today's society, with the help of areas such as information technology, information systems, and information science. For this purpose, specific processes and techniques are used for gathering or generating intelligence, processing it through analysis and synthesis, generating predictions and strategies, transmitting and presenting it to decision maker, and storing it. Information science deals with analyzing, collecting, classifying, manipulating, storing, retrieving and disseminating information. (Sfetcu 2016) It is often (mistakenly) considered a branch of computer science. Information science addresses systemic problems from the perspective of the people involved and can be considered as a response to technological determinism. The information philosophy studies the specific conceptual aspects, including the investigation of conceptual nature and the basic principles of information, their dynamics, their use, and the elaboration and application of theoretical information and specific methodologies. (Floridi 2002) In information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts, and the relationship between these concepts. Information extraction is the science of document search, document information, and document metadata, as well as search in relational databases and the Internet. Each type of search has its own features, theories, practices and technologies. Access to information is a field of research aimed at automating the processing of large and cumbersome amounts of information and simplifying users' access to them. The information architecture focuses on the principles of design and architecture in the digital landscape based on a model or concept of information being used in intelligence analysis activities. Information management involves collecting and managing information from one or more sources and distributing this information to one or more segments. Knowledge representation is a field of research that aims to represent knowledge in symbols to facilitate the interference between these elements of knowledge and the creation of new elements of knowledge. Exploring the representation of knowledge implies an analysis of the reasoning. Logic is used to provide formal semantics of how reasoning functions should be applied to symbols in the knowledge representation system, and to define how operators can process and reshape knowledge. (Deshmukh and Ali 2014) Information systems are organized for collecting, organizing, storing and communicating information. The field of information systems is complementary to that of collecting, filtering, processing, creating and distributing data. (Sfetcu 2016) Any specific information system is intended to support operations, management and decision-making. (Bulgacs 2013) Information systems interrelate with data systems and activity systems on the other, being a communications system in which data is represented and is processed as a form of social memory. An information system can also be considered a semi-formal language that supports decision-making and human action. Silver et al. have provided two perspectives for SI including software, hardware, data, people, and procedures. (Silver, Markus, and Beath 1995) Zheng offered another approach to the information system, (Zheng 2014) which also adds essential system processes and elements such as environment, limit, purpose, and interactions. Collecting, analyzing, and using information about opponents have existed since ancient times. Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese strategist in the Art of War, (Yuen 2014) stressed the need to understand yourself and the enemy through information, identifying different roles: the secret agent, the penetration agent, and the misinformation agent. Sun Tzu highlighted the need for a methodology and noted the role of counterinformation, double agents and psychological warfare. In India, in the 4th century BC, Chanakya (also called Kautilya) wrote Arthashastra, a state management and political economy manual, providing a detailed methodology of intelligence gathering, processing, and consumption operations as an indispensable means for maintaining and expanding the security and state power. (Shoham and Liebig 2016) King David IV of Georgia, at the beginning of the twelfth century, used spies to discover feudal conspiracy and infiltration into key locations. (Aladashvili 2017) The Aztecs used traders and diplomats with diplomatic immunity for espionage. (Soustelle 2002) Francis Walsingham was the first European to use modern espionage methods in Elizabethan England, helping with experts in various fields. (Andrew 2018) In the eighteenth century there was a dramatic expansion of espionage activities. In France under the King Louis XIV (1643-1715) and under the leadership of Cardinal Mazarin (1642-1661), a well-organized information system was set up. To cope with the wars with France, London has also set up a system designed to gather information about France and other powers. During the American Revolution, 1775-1783, US General George Washington successfully developed an espionage system to detect British locations and plans, being the "First Spy of America". (Nagy 2016) During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Allan Pinkerton first operated a detective agency, then serving as Head of the Union Intelligence Service in the early years. The Austrian Empire founded the Evidenzbureau in 1850 as the first permanent military intelligence service. The topographic and statistical department of T&SD was established at the British War Office as an embryonic military intelligence organization. The French Ministry of War authorized the creation, on June 8, 1871, of the Deuxième Bureau, a service tasked with conducting "research on enemy plans and operations." In Germany, Marshal Helmuth von Moltke set up a military intelligence unit, Abteilung (Section IIIb), of the German General Staff in 1889, which expanded constantly operating in France and Russia. The UfficioInformazioni del Commando Supremo of Italy was permanently established in 1900. After the defeat of Russia in the Russian-Japanese War of 1904-05, the Russian military service was reorganized under the Seventh Division of the imperial second executive committee. In the United Kingdom, the Secret Service (OSS), set up in 1909 as the first independent and interdepartmental agency to control all spy government activities, was divided between an external service and counterintelligence in 1910. With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, all major powers had very sophisticated structures for training and manipulating spies and for processing intelligence obtained through espionage. At that time, modern techniques of espionage were sought and refined to obtain military intelligence, sabotage and propaganda. Two new methods for intelligence gathering were developed during the war aerial recognition and shooting, and interception and decryption of radio signals. (Wheeler 2012) The perception of intelligence as power has intensified during the Second World War, when several intelligence agencies has been formalized and significantly increased. In all countries, new agencies and departments have been set up to deal with threats. During the Second World War, Churchill's order has been devised to train spies and saboteurs under the command of the SOE (Special Operations Executive) and ultimately involve the United States in their training facilities. OSS's research and analysis branch has brought together many academics and experts who have proven to be particularly useful to provide a very detailed overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the German war effort. MI5 in the UK and the US FBI identified all the German spies and "turned" them into double agents, so their reports to Berlin were rewritten by counterintelligence teams. The FBI played a leading role in American counter-intelligence and gathered together all the German spies in June 1941. (Persico 2002) Counterintelligence included the use of agents to disinform Nazi Germany about the impact points during the blitz and isolation of the Japanese in the US against the Japanese espionage program during the war. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was particularly successful in introducing spies into the UK and West Germany but failed in the United States. NATO, on the other hand, also had some important successes. The focus on the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union has dominated thinking in Western intelligence communities. In analyzing information in the 1950s, Walter Laqueur argues that Soviet military capabilities and intentions remain the most important subject for US secret services. (Laqueur 1993) After the Cold War, governments and intelligence agencies continued to use the conventional model to assess state threats. But security concepts have faded from a highly militarized confrontation between known adversaries and increased concern over non-state threats that were harder to identify. Non-state actors have become strategic threats, the concept of "strategic terrorism" being developed as soon as the September 2001 attacks. Bruce Berkowitz argues that there have been terrorist actions in the past, but bin Laden was the first to use widespread strategic terrorism against a Super power. (Berkowitz 2002) Globalization and people and technology mobility have favored non-state actors. (Waltz 2003) The CIA Director, James Woolsey, told the House of Representatives Committee for National Security in the United States that "we were fighting with a dragon for some 45 years and slew the dragon and then found ourselves in a jungle full of a number of poisonous snakes. And that in many ways, the snakes are a lot harder to keep track of than the dragon ever was." (Woolsey 1998) In 2007, Jonathan Evans, the UK's chief security officer (MI5), described the terrorist threat as "the most immediate and acute threat to peace in the history of my 98-year service." (Evans 2007) Government publications in developed countries, following the September 11, 2001 attack, reflected a consensus that intelligence services are key to preventing mass attacks, spending huge amounts for the intelligence agencies that are considered a major component of national security systems. The intelligence agencies are primarily responsible for identifying and preventing threats to national security, promptly and effectively informing decision-makers about these threats, and accurate and timely assessments and predictions of future conflicts or threats. Currently in the United States there are seventeen (Intelligence.gov 2013) federal agencies forming the United States Intelligence Community. The Central Intelligence Agency uses the National Clandestine Service (NCS) (CIA.gov 2009a) for intelligence gathering and undercover operations. (CIA.gov 2009b) The National Security Agency collects information from the signals. Initially, the CIA led the US-IC. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was created to promote the exchange of intelligence. Bibliography Aladashvili, Besik. 2017. Fearless: A Fascinating Story of Secret Medieval Spies. Andrew, Christopher. 2018. The Secret World: A History of Intelligence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Berkowitz, Bruce. 2002. "Intelligence and the War on Terrorism." ResearchGate. 2002. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248543624_Intelligence_and_the_War_on_Ter rorism. Bulgacs, Simon. 2013. "The First Phase of Creating a Standardised International Innovative Technological Implementation Framework/Software Application." International Journal of Business and Systems Research 7 (3): 250. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJBSR.2013.055312. CIA.gov. 2009a. "Our Mission - Central Intelligence Agency." 2009. https://www.cia.gov/offices-of-cia/clandestine-service/our-mission.html. ---. 2009b. "Who We Are - Central Intelligence Agency." 2009. https://www.cia.gov/offices-of-cia/clandestine-service/who-we-are.html. Deshmukh, Pranita P., and Mir Shabbar Ali. 2014. "Overview of Xml Based Knowledge Representation Using Scripts." In . Evans, Jonathan. 2007. "Jonathan Evans, MI5 Director General's Speech on Intelligence, Counter-Terrorism and Trust, 5 November 2007." https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/nov/05/terrorism.world. Floridi, Luciano. 2002. "What Is the Philosophy of Information?" Metaphilosophy 33 (1–2): 123–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9973.00221. Intelligence.gov. 2013. "Seventeen Agencies and Organizations United Under One Goal." 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20130502012837/http://www.intelligence.gov/about-theintelligence-community/. Laqueur, Walter. 1993. The Uses and Limits of Intelligence. Transaction Publishers. Nagy, John A. 2016. George Washington's Secret Spy War: The Making of America's First Spymaster. St. Martin's Press. Persico, Joseph E. 2002. Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage. Random House. Sfetcu, Nicolae. 2016. Cunoaștere și Informații. Nicolae Sfetcu. Shoham, Dany, and Michael Liebig. 2016. "The Intelligence Dimension of Kautilyan Statecraft and Its Implications for the Present." Journal of Intelligence History 15 (2): 119–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/16161262.2015.1116330. Silver, Mark S., M. Lynne Markus, and Cynthia Mathis Beath. 1995. "The Information Technology Interactive Model: A Foundation for the MBA Core Course." 1995. https://misq.org/catalog/product/view/id/668. Soustelle, Jacques. 2002. Daily Life of the Aztecs. Courier Corporation. Stewart, Thomas A. 2001. The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-First Century Organization. New York, NY, USA: Doubleday. Waltz, Edward. 2003. Knowledge Management in the Intelligence Enterprise. Artech House. Wheeler, Douglas L. 2012. "A Guide to the History of Intelligence 1800–1918." https://www.afio.com/publications/Wheeler_Hist_of_Intel_18001918_in_AFIO_INTEL_WinterSprg2012.pdf. Woolsey, James. 1998. "Testimony, 12 February 1998, US House of Representatives Committee on National Security." https://fas.org/irp/congress/1998_hr/h980212w.htm. Yuen, Derek M. C. 2014. Deciphering Sun Tzu: How to Read "The Art of War." Oxford University Press. Zheng, Jack. 2014. "Information System a System View." Technology. https://www.slideshare.net/jgzheng/information-system-a-system-view.


The politics of uncertainty

Philosophy

EDITOR LETTER The Politics of Uncertainty Luciano Floridi Published online: 20 February 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 What is uncertainty? There are of course several possible definitions, offered by different fields, from epistemology to statistics, but, in the background, one usually finds some kind of relation with the lack of information, in the following sense. Suppose we define semantic or factual information as the combination of a question plus the relevant, correct answer. If one has both the question and the correct answer, one is informed: Bwas Berlin the capital of Germany in 2010? Yes^. If one has the question but the incorrect answer, one is insipient. If one has neither, one is ignorant. And if one has only the question but not the answer, then one is uncertain. Uncertainty is what a correct answer to a relevant question erases. This is why, in information theory, the value of information is often discussed in terms of the amount of uncertainty that it decreases. And this is also why there are many things in life that we value, but uncertainty is not usually one of them. At first sight, this may seem to be unproblematic, indeed obvious. What we actually value is information, understandable now as the appropriate combination of relevant questions and correct answers, the Qs and the As. We value information because it is power: power to understand what happened, forecast what will happen and, hence, choose now among the things that could happen between the past and the future. Marx and the past two centuries thought that power, understood as the sociopolitical ability to control or influence people's behaviour, was exercised through the creation or control of (the means of production of) things, i.e. goods and services. But it is equally clear that power is also exercised through the creation or control of (the means of production of) information about things, e.g. laws, statistics, news or technoscience. To use a trivial example, if you wish to buy a secondhand car, you value information about its past (was it involved in any accident? yes), its future (is it expensive to run? yes) and its present (should I haggle over the price? yes). The more information you have, the better you may shape your environment and control its development and the more advantage you may enjoy against competitors who lack such a resource. This applies even to stand-alone contexts: Robinson Crusoe wishes to have information about the island, even if there is nobody else. But it applies even more strongly to socio-political contexts: once Robinson Crusoe is joined by Friday, the native Philos. Technol. (2015) 28:1–4 DOI 10.1007/s13347-015-0192-0 L. Floridi (*) Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com cannibals, the shipwrecked Spaniards and the English mutineers, the asymmetric nature of his informational state (he has answers to questions that they lack) is enormously advantageous, to the point of being life-saving. On the contrary, being uncertain means that none of this immediately holds true, because one has only the relevant questions without the correct answers, only the Qs without the As. Just remove the three yesses from the previous questions about the second-hand car and you immediately appreciate why nobody likes to be in such a state of informational deficit. Because each of us finds information valuable and uncertainty uncomfortable, one may be tempted to generalise and declare uncertainty a disvalue in absolute terms: having only relevant questions is always bad, adding the correct answers is always good. We value information precisely because it reduces uncertainty. If you like one you dislike the other, it seems a zero-sum game. Yet adopting this simplistic view would be a mistake. A liberal, tolerant and fair society is one in which any question is allowed, but not all questions are supposed to be answered. A healthy degree of uncertainty is both welcomed and fostered. Let me explain. First, one must recall that uncertainty is preferable to ignorance and insipience, because lacking answers is not as bad as lacking the questions in the first place, or having the wrong answers. Imagine you did not think about asking whether the secondhand car you bought required a very expensive insurance, or indeed you just assumed it did not. Often Byou should have known better^ only means Byou should have asked^. It is not uncertainty but rather ignorance and insipience that are an absolute disvalue. For only if you have no questions or you think you already have the answers you may never get correct answers. Fundamentalists of all kind know this well. This is why any society that forbids or discourages free questioning and spreads misinformation is illiberal and in need of reform. Second, uncertainty has value insofar as it makes the relationship between questions and answers a bit more problematic, and rightly so. Sceptics love doubts that untie the As from the Qs. We should be grateful to them. The value of sceptical doubts and of the uncertainty they generate lie in the extremely demanding standards that they set up to test the correctness of our answers. It is a bit like driving your second-hand car under the most extreme weather conditions. Scepticism is the ultimate benchmark of knowledge. So people who understand scepticism use it judiciously. Descartes, in questioning the ultimate foundation of all knowledge-a task that could not have been more crucial-chose the ultimate challenger: a malicious demon that is constantly deceiving us, even about the clearest answers to the most basic questions about simple mathematical truths. He offered the ultimate answer: I think therefore I am, this much is absolutely certain. Of course, when buying a second-hand car, you do not need to entertain such extreme possibility. And yet, a pinch of sceptical uncertainty may still be healthy, for you may not be fooled by a demon, but you might be conned by a salesman. In short, some induced uncertainty and the ability to entertain alternative answers to the same question has an epistemological value that we should not underestimate, in science as well as in everyday life. Dogmatic societies that assume there is only one correct answer to fundamental questions-being these about abortion, same-sex marriage, dress codes, alcohol and recreational drugs, assisted suicide or other similar divisive issues-tend to be intolerant and could definitely do with a healthy dose of uncertainty. 2 L. Floridi Finally and most importantly, uncertainty can be harnessed in order to restrain the power that comes with information, or constrain it to make it perform better. The first point is simpler. Information-as-power can easily be abused, and it is sometimes better not to empower people in the first place, rather than trust them to use their power fairly and wisely, not least because the Bnicê people of today may be replaced by nastier ones tomorrow. Think about political preferences, for example: your vote should be and remain secret, no matter how free I am to ask questions about it. The same holds true about private choices, tastes, inclinations or behaviours: your business, my uncertainty. The second point, that some degree of uncertainty may actually be good for the overall informational state of the system, is less intuitive. To put it simply, information-aspower, if unlimited, may actually perform less well, socially, than when there are some limits. This is known, in game and network theory, as Braess' paradox. It can be proved that, sometimes, blocking roads can actually speed up traffic. This is counterintuitive, so allow me to trivialise it. Think of the case in which each passenger gets out of a bus slightly less quickly but much more ordinately, so that the whole group actually moves faster. This paradoxical conclusion applies to information traffic as well. If we add some friction to the flow of information, if some questions remain unanswerable in principle (blocked, using the network traffic analogy), this may actually improve the performance of the overall system. If everybody remains slightly uncertain about some carefully chosen topics, the whole society ends up enjoying a better flow of information about other, perhaps more pressing issues. Each of us would like to be omniscient, at least in the sense of having access to the correct answer to any question but, socially, this would be a disaster, for boundless information leads to boundless power (omnipotence), which rationally and selfishly used breeds irreconcilable conflicts and ultimately a gridlock. John Rawls' famous Bveil of ignorancê is actually a Bveil of uncertainty , which exploits precisely the value of a lack of answers, in order to develop an impartial approach to justice in terms of fairness: we should determine the value of an action or institution or custom as if we did not have an answer to the question how it would affect us, that is, which position we would hold in the issuing society that would approve of it. In medicine, we have learnt that, at normal levels in the blood, cholesterol is an essential substance for the normal functioning of the body. Just because high cholesterol is a problem, which therefore needs to be kept under control, this does not mean that excessively low cholesterol is not unhealthy as well. In economics, we have learnt a similar lesson about inflation. For a long time, we treated it as an absolute disvalue and tried to eradicate it completely, but it seems clear now that a low (as opposed to zero or negative) and steady rate of inflation is actually preferable, because it can reduce the severity of economic recessions and favour more stability. In philosophy, it is time we learn the value of a low and stable degree of uncertainty. It is unhealthy to eradicate it completely, for a small dose of unanswered questions in the social system leads to increased degrees of liberalism, toleration and fairness, as well as more efficient flows of information. It seems that the value of information also lies in what it can teach us about its own equilibria. A final point may be worth mentioning. The twentieth century saw the emergence of an informational turn in sociopolitical power. As George Orwell famously wrote in 1984: BThose who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.^ What he had in mind was informational control. Today, we are The Politics of Uncertainty 3 probably witnessing an equally deep shift. For in liberal societies, awash with cheap goods and free information, power is exercised about which questions can be asked and what answers can be received: transparency, privacy, right to be forgotten, freedom of speech, ownership rights... the morphology of the flows of information is the morphology of uncertainty. Today, those who control the questions shape the answers and those who shape the answers control the world. Clearly, it is time to investigate the politics of uncertainty. 4 L. Floridi