DIA

After Pledging Huge IT Savings, Can NSA’s Alexander Deliver?

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ORLANDO: Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, told a standing-room-only crowd at the annual Geoint intelligence conference last year that the NSA and its sister intelligence agencies could save one third or more on their information technology costs by moving to the so-called cloud.

Given that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said last year that the intelligence budget cuts over the next decade would be in the “double digits” — our best information is that the cuts are around $25 bilion over a decade — the pressure is on for Alexander to deliver. Keep reading →

Published October 10, 2012 at 7:45 PM

Pentagon Pushes For Greater Spy Powers; Wants To Run Businesses, Like CIA

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ON A TRAIN SOMEWHERE ON THE EAST COAST: Imagine a soldier, wearing mufti, traveling through Syria in a rattletrap taxi. He’s a spy, dressed in a suit, going to meet an agent who says he can offer rebels the Syrian government’s order of battle.

The soldier, an Army intelligence officer fluent in Syrian and Iraqi Arabic, has spent 18 months cultivating the source, a senior official in the telecommunications company owned by the brother of Syria’s president. The son of a general, the agent has grown disillusioned by two years of civil war and wants to help end his country’s agony. His information could help the rebels break the regime’s back. Keep reading →

Published April 20, 2012 at 5:30 PM

Services Getting More Control Over DIA Intel Systems

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Washington: The Defense Intelligence Agency is giving the services and the big three military intelligence agencies more control over the design and usage of its critical information technology products.

The idea is to let those organizations tweak and modify DIA products to meet their needs without having to wait for Pentagon IT engineers to make those changes, said Grant Schneider, DIA’s chief information officer. They will now be able to get what they need from those products faster and more efficiently under this new IT model, Schneider said today during a speech on cloud computing in Washington. Keep reading →

Published October 26, 2011 at 9:30 AM

Air Force Tackles New Intel Mission

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Washington: The Pentagon’s top intelligence official has ordered the Air Force to set up a new intelligence unit to analyze the behavior of foreign-based commercial aircraft and integrate intelligence from the combatant commanders as the planes move through American airspace. Keep reading →

Published August 9, 2011 at 10:30 AM

Senate Presses DIA to Share Raw Data: ‘Connect the Dots’

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WASHINGTON: Lawmakers want the Pentagon’s intelligence shop to play nice with the rest of the intelligence community, and they have the program to do just that.

Included in the Senate Armed Service Committee’s version of the fiscal year 2012 defense authorization bill, a Defense Intelligence Agency-led “pilot demonstration” program will allow the Pentagon to share and receive raw intel gathered by other agencies in the intelligence community. Keep reading →

Published July 13, 2011 at 1:03 PM