This new resource presents the principles and applications in the emerging discipline of Activity-Based Intelligence (ABI). This book will define, clarify, and demystify the tradecraft of ABI by providing concise definitions, clear examples, and thoughtful discussion. Concepts, methods, technologies, and applications of ABI have been developed by and for the intelligence community and in this book you will gain an understanding of ABI principles and be able to apply them to activity based intelligence analysis. The book is intended for intelligence professionals, researchers, intelligence studies, policy makers, government staffers, and industry representatives. This book will help practicing professionals understand ABI and how it can be applied to real-world problems.

A powerful story of war in our time, of love of country, the experience of tragedy, and a platoon at the center of it all. This is a story that starts off close and goes very big. The initial part of the story might sound familiar at first: it is about a platoon of mostly nineteen-year-old boys sent to Afghanistan, and an experience that ends abruptly in catastrophe. Their part of the story folds into the next: inexorably linked to those soldiers and never comprehensively reported before is the U.S. Department of Defense’s quest to build the world’s most powerful biometrics database, with the ability to identify, monitor, catalog, and police people all over the world. First Platoon is an American saga that illuminates a transformation of society made possible by this new technology. Part war story, part legal drama, it is about identity in the age of identification. About humanity—physical bravery, trauma, PTSD, a yearning to do right and good—in the age of biometrics, which reduce people to iris scans, fingerprint scans, voice patterning, detection by odor, gait, and more. And about the power of point of view in a burgeoning surveillance state. Based on hundreds of formerly classified documents, FOIA requests, and exclusive interviews, First Platoon is an investigative exposé by a master chronicler of government secrets. First Platoon reveals a post–9/11 Pentagon whose identification machines have grown more capable than the humans who must make sense of them. A Pentagon so powerful it can cover up its own internal mistakes in pursuit of endless wars. And a people at its mercy, in its last moments before a fundamental change so complete it might be impossible to take back.

A comprehensive discussion of operational requirements for future naval operations with sufficient detail to enable design and development of technical solutions to achieve the advanced information fusion and command and control concepts described. This book provides a unique focus on advanced approaches to Naval ISR and the critical underlying technologies to enable Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO). Also describing the approach of distributed Naval ops and role of ISR applying advanced technologies and addressing future conflict, new U.S. Naval maritime approaches, distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) and the newest U.S. Navy operational concept. This is a great resource for Naval officers in the ISR, Intelligence, Space, ASW, EW and Surface Warfare, disciplines who seek an in-depth understanding of advanced ISR operations and technologies as well as Navy and industry managers and engineers planning and developing advanced naval systems.

National intelligence agencies have long adjusted to the opportunities and threats from new technologies, and have created structures, concepts, and practices to best apply new capabilities. But such recent technological developments as artificial intelligence are different in kind. Increasingly affordable to nongovernmental actors, they are powerful enough to overwhelm and marginalize much of what agencies do. In The Future of National Intelligence: How Emerging Technologies Reshape Intelligence Communities, Shay Hershkovitz argues that only with a new paradigm can these agencies take up this fundamentally new technological challenge.

When Joint Special Operations Command deployed Task Force 714 to Iraq in 2003, it faced an adversary unlike any it had previously encountered: al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). AQI’s organization into multiple, independent networks and its application of Information Age technologies allowed it to wage war across a vast landscape. To meet this unique threat, TF 714 developed the intelligence capacity to operate inside those networks, and in the words of commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, USA (Ret.) “claw the guts out of AQI.” In Transforming US Intelligence for Irregular War, Richard H. Shultz Jr. provides a broad discussion of the role of intelligence in combatting nonstate militants and revisits this moment of innovation during the Iraq War, showing how the defense and intelligence communities can adapt to new and evolving foes. Shultz tells the story of how TF 714 partnered with US intelligence agencies to dismantle AQI’s secret networks by eliminating many of its key leaders. He also reveals how TF 714 altered its methods and practices of intelligence collection, intelligence analysis, and covert paramilitary operations to suppress AQI’s growing insurgency and, ultimately, destroy its networked infrastructure. TF 714 remains an exemplar of successful organizational learning and adaptation in the midst of modern warfare. By examining its innovations, Shultz makes a compelling case for intelligence leading the way in future campaigns against nonstate armed groups.

This open access book brings together a range of contributions that seek to explore the ethical issues arising from the overlap between counter-terrorism, ethics, and technologies. Terrorism and our responses pose some of the most significant ethical challenges to states and people. At the same time, we are becoming increasingly aware of the ethical implications of new and emerging technologies. Whether it is the use of remote weapons like drones as part of counter-terrorism strategies, the application of surveillance technologies to monitor and respond to terrorist activities, or counterintelligence agencies use of machine learning to detect suspicious behavior and hacking computers to gain access to encrypted data, technologies play a significant role in modern counter-terrorism. However, each of these technologies carries with them a range of ethical issues and challenges. How we use these technologies and the policies that govern them have broader impact beyond just the identification and response to terrorist activities. As we are seeing with China, the need to respond to domestic terrorism is one of the justifications for their rollout of the “social credit system.” Counter-terrorism technologies can easily succumb to mission creep, where a technology’s exceptional application becomes normalized and rolled out to society more generally. This collection is not just timely but an important contribution to understand the ethics of counter-terrorism and technology and has far wider implications for societies and nations around the world.

Developing Intelligence Theory analyses the current state of intelligence theorisation, provides a guide to a range of approaches and perspectives, and points towards future research agendas in this field. Key questions discussed include the role of intelligence theory in organising the study of intelligence, how (and how far) explanations of intelligence have progressed in the last decade, and how intelligence theory should develop from here. Significant changes have occurred in the security intelligence environment in recent years—including transformative information technologies, the advent of ‘new’ terrorism, and the emergence of hybrid warfare—making this an opportune moment to take stock and consider how we explain what intelligence does and how. The material made available via the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks and subsequent national debates has contributed much to our understanding of contemporary intelligence processes and has significant implications for future theorisation, for example, in relation to the concept of ‘surveillance’. The contributors are leading figures in Intelligence Studies who represent a range of different approaches to conceptual thinking about intelligence. As such, their contributions provide a clear statement of the current parameters of debates in intelligence theory, while also pointing to ways in which the study of intelligence continues to develop. This book was originally published as a special issue of Intelligence and National Security.