At most intelligence agencies, smart phones don’t get much further than the front doors of the facility:
“I just had a discussion with the [National Security Agency] leadership team…and the topic was how do we bring mobility [and] unclassified architecture into what we do, much of which is in a much more compartmented, much more segmented arena?” Adm. Mike Rogers, NSA director and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, said June 24 at the GEOINT Symposium in Washington, D.C. “Mobility and the ability to maintain a digital interface no matter where we are, no matter what we’re doing, is increasingly a cornerstone of our personal lives, and it’s increasingly a cornerstone of our professional lives as well. So NSA, like many organizations, is trying to figure out our ability to execute on that in our missions.”
Solutions are not necessarily easy to come by. In some cases, the intelligence community can likely take cues from the Defense Department, where information-sharing on the move has become ingrained in military operations. These days it’s not unusual to see personal smart phones in the halls of the Pentagon, but the same cannot be said for Fort Meade or other of the intelligence agencies’ highly secure facilities.
Much of the intelligence community’s operations and information ride on top-secret – or higher – networks. Those networks are more tightly held than those of the military services’, making it tougher to try to connect mobile devices, move data and share information.
In the Army, the Mounted Android Computing Environment extends network capabilities to dismounted soldiers and connects devices to the Joint Battle Command-Platform. The open Android architecture uses apps to link smart phones and radios for soldiers in the theater, allowing them to share intelligence quickly and on the move.
“With MACE, one of the overriding requirements is to maintain secure connectivity on the battlefield – that’s something defense partners have been working on for a long time because over the last 10 or 15 years, that’s become the necessity,” said Steve Omick, president of Vencore Labs, which works with the Army on MACE. “They’ve got to get imagery to warfighters’ hands, they’ve got to get communications out there, and they’ve got to have secure ways of doing that. But that’s more at the secret kind of level. When you go within the [intelligence community] and you’re talking top secret, top secret-[sensitive compartmented information] capabilities, it becomes a whole different kind of problem to maintain those levels of classified connectivity and also the flexibility people want. It’s hard enough on the battlefield.”
Hard as it may be, Rogers said he’s committed to integrating mobility in the NSA, if not the broader intelligence community, starting with determining and defining risk tolerance and mitigation.
“There are some who argue that it represents increased vulnerabilities and increased risk, therefore we have to be very circumspect in how much we apply this technology … but at the end of the day we cannot turn our backs on mobility and the ability to generate better mission outcomes,” Rogers said. “The right answer, to me, is not ‘let’s not do mobile.’ That’s a losing strategy. What I tell my team is we need to do this at NSA and more broadly across the IC in a way that recognizes and acknowledges the risk and attempts to mitigate that risk…so that we’re making smart tradeoffs. It won’t be
