Washington Technologies White Papers
Frederick Thomas Martin, Deputy Director, Information Services
Group, National Security Agency
The US National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the
Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and other
top agencies (collectively known as the United States Intelligence
Community) are significantly improving their intelligence gathering and
reporting systems through the development and implementation of advanced
technology including networking and international information standards
such as SGML.
Intelink is the classified, world wide "Intranet" for the
intelligence community. Intelink addresses one of the world's largest data
management problems, involving demanding requirements that are at the
extreme of what normal enterprises require. Intelink is used by
intelligence customers and consumers from the warfighter to the White
House and has been "declared as the strategic direction for Community
product dissemination systems" by D/SecDef and
DCI.
Intelink is currently being used in support of several basic and key
functional areas. Perhaps the most significant of these areas is the
electronic publishing and distribution of our nation's intelligence
reports. "Signals Intelligence" (SIGINT)
Reports have gone from the world of reports in only ASCII text to robust
multimedia formats with distribution, using SGML, over
Intelink.
Within NSA, the reporting and publication of "end-product",
or "finished intelligence", was in the recent past a difficult
dissemination process, which used hand- and computer-produced hard copy
report of text files. Classes of intelligence were "pushed" to
the users, or customers. Newer techniques now allow customers to "pull"
needed intelligence from SGML data bases thus allowing
data re-use as well as rich multi-media materials, all from a controlled,
protected, classified community intranet. Now NSA and
the Community, is coming full circle in its approach to finished
intelligence, once again working towards "pushing" intelligence,
although now primarily in electronic form. This is in concert with the
latest thinking and trends on World Wide Web applications, and is enabled
through the use of data standards, including SGML.
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