C. Wiebes - Intelligence en de oorlog in Bosnië 1992-1995. De rol van de inlichtingen- en veiligheidsdiensten - Engels

200also means that the intelligence of the NSA does not form a strong basis because it consists only of rawSigint (a single source product) and not of ‘finished intelligence’ (an all source product). Theresponsibility for creating a finished intelligence product lies with the consumers of the raw materialsupplied by the NSA. Consequently, analysts within the US intelligence community must analysehundreds or even thousands of Sigint items if they want to get a clear picture. A member of anAmerican intelligence service stated with regard to this: ‘You rarely get a Sigint smoking gun. It’s usuallyvery fragmentary (…) Very often you don’t even know who you’re listening to.’ 1062 This confirms thatneither Sigint provides all the answers; used alone, it is certainly not enough to expose the politicalplans or internal political machinations of a foreign government. For that matter, Imint and Humint areseldom able to do this either.A seventh disadvantage is that although Sigint is fast, it can still sometimes arrive too late.During the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 there was enough Sigintavailable in the NSA for instance, but its processing, analysis and reporting proved to be too timeconsuming.The Sigint first became available days after these two invasions. This relates to the eighthdisadvantage, which is probably the most important one: the flow of information is enormous but theanalysis capability is not sufficient. Powerful computers can carry out a rapid preselection and separatethe wheat from the chaff, but it is the analyst who must ultimately decide if a message is valuable. In atime of crisis Sigint organizations are flooded with masses of intercepts. CIA analysts were not able topredict the war in the Middle East in 1973 because they had hundreds of Comint reports from the NSAon their desks and thus, to put it simply, were unable to see the wood for the trees.Admiral McConnell, the director of the NSA in 1995, stated for instance that ‘NSA’s capabilityto intercept far exceeds its capability to decode, analyse and report. The goods news is the agency candecode and analyse a million messages a day; the bad news is the agency must decide which million, ofthe billions of messages sent globally, to decode.’ 1063 Around 1995 the NSA did indeed process aboutjust one percent of the intercepts that reached its headquarters in Fort Meade: in the 1980s this figurehad been twenty percent. It was typical for the relationship between incoming intercepts and outgoingintelligence that the current director of the NSA, General Hayden, had to admit that the NSA nowproduces less intelligence than it did ten years ago. The intelligence production of the NSA was also nothelped by the fact – revealed by an internal study in early 1995 – that there was constant bureaucraticinfighting between the military and civilian sections of the Operations Division of this organization.This brought a considerable delay in the flow of intelligence to other departments: in mid-1995 manyconsumers of the intelligence products of the NSA complained that the NSA was not meeting theirneeds. 1064 A ninth disadvantage is formed by the inherent vulnerability of Comint. Signals are renderedsecure, codes can suddenly be changed, the transmitters can frequency-hop (whereby the transmitterjumps between different frequencies in a pattern known only to the legitimate recipient). Bursttransmissions can be conducted as well, in which enormous amounts of information are sent in a fewseconds. A spread spectrum can be used, whereby the information for transmission is distributed oversimultaneously transmitted frequencies. Another way for the ‘eavesdropped’ party to disrupt Comint isto intentionally disseminate false messages in the hope that these will be intercepted. Cryptography isanother excellent method of protecting communications traffic. Millis described this as one of themajor threats to the efforts of the NSA: according to him Sigint was in a crisis due to these factors andthe world of communications traffic could no longer be called Sigint-friendly. 10651062 Bob Drogin, ‘Crash Jolts US e-Spy Agency’, Los Angeles Times, 21/03/00.1063 Charles Smith, ‘The information vacuum cleaner’, WorldNetDaily, 09/04/00.1064 Matthew M. Aid, ‘The Time of Troubles: The US NSA in the Twenty-First Century’, in: Intelligence and National Security,Vol. 15 (2000), 3, pp. 17-20.1065 ‘Address at the CIRA Luncheon, 5 October 1998; John Millis’ speech, in: CIRA Newsletter, Vol. XXIII (1998/1999), 4, p.4; E.A.O. Onderdelinden, ‘sigint. What is this actually?’, Militaire Spectator Vol. 170 (2001) 12, pp. 675-683.