The recent publication of the book “TOP SECRET Intranet” (Prentice Hall, NJ, ISBN 0-13-080898-9) by a former top-level NSA official, Fredrick Thomas Martin, constitutes what could well be the first concrete sign that the American intelligence community has begun its cultural revolution.  The book makes that immediately obvious.  Although Intelink, the ultra secure Intranet system used by 13 American intelligence agencies, was launched only three years ago in 1996, Martin, who was deputy director of NSA’s Information Services Group when he retired in 1997, doesn’t balk at outlining its origins, specifications and how it is used.  And he aims to use a firm he founded after leaving NSA to sell the same system to private companies while continuing to advise the CIA in the field of information technology. [Errata: Martin is Vice President and Director of Intelligence Community Programs at High Performance Technologies, Inc., a Reston, Virginia based firm specializing in the application of leading-edge information technologies.]  

And he isn’t doing it as a freelance but with the active encouragement of leading American intelligence officials, including Ruth David, current CIA deputy director for science and technology, who wrote a prologue to the book.  She voiced the need for “agile intelligence” and declared that American agencies had to learn to operate “with a shorter time cycle.” To do that, Ms. David declared, they needed to adopt “collaborative work processes” and share their information.  

This, indeed, is precisely the aim of Intelink which was started with strong backing from William Crowell, the deputy director of NSA who is now president and CEO of Cylink (a company that specializes in encryption systems, primarily for banks: see Intelligence Newsletter 327).  Crowell’s support was indeed a sign NSA was breaking out of its isolation and the agency has since done its utmost to get corporate America to adopt its organizational methods and security standards.  

While the majority of intelligence agencies in the world continue to use proprietary communication systems and databases, Intelink was built entirely with commercial, off-the-shelf software at relatively low cost and is currently used on a daily basis by 50,000 analysts, military men and political leaders.  

Martin gives several concrete cases of how Intelink was set up, specially at the trail-blazing Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific (JICPAC), a Hawaii-based military intelligence outfit.  It was analysts from the center’s southern Asian department who came up with the idea of producing “living intelligence documents” whose format was divorced from their contents and could thus be used and re-used on any support (paper, CD-Rom, Internet, etc).  They quickly came to the conclusion that the only possible format was the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), fore-runner of the Internet’s HTML, which was invented in 1974 by Charles Goldfarb.  SGML and its metadata that describe content was subsequently adopted by the entire Intelink system (devised and set up essentially by Steve Schanzer and headed at present by James Peak).  As SGML remains relatively cumbersome to use it is expected to shortly be replaced by another standard developed on the Internet, Extended Markup Language, XML.