Polar Ice from Satellite view
According to the New York Times, data sharing between the C.I.A. and leading scientists has resumed.
The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests.
Basically speaking, US top scientists are receiving top security clearances to have access to C.I.A. reconnaisance material. This program was shut down by the Bush administration. It has the strong approval of the director of the C.I.A. and of leading scientists.
In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends, and they have had images of the ice pack declassified to speed the scientific analysis.
The trove of images is “really useful,” said Norbert Untersteiner, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in polar ice and is a member of the team of spies and scientists behind the effort.
Scientists, Dr. Untersteiner said, “have no way to send out 500 people” across the top of the world to match the intelligence gains, adding that the new understandings might one day result in ice forecasts.
“That will be very important economically and logistically,” Dr. Untersteiner said, arguing that Arctic thaws will open new fisheries and sea lanes for shipping and spur the hunt for undersea oil and gas worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
The monitoring program has little impact on regular intelligence gathering–the work of spies. The reason it requires top security is that the C.I.A. doesn’t want its enemies to know the capabilities of its spy equipment and what kinds of information it is gathering. The information that the scientists use can almost be likened to a by-product. The program is not without critics, however:
Controversy has often dogged the use of federal intelligence gear for environmental monitoring. In October, days after the C.I.A. opened a small unit to assess the security implications of climate change, Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said the agency should be fighting terrorists, “not spying on sea lions.”
Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences and a member of the monitoring team, said the program was “basically free.”
“People who don’t know details are the ones who are complaining,” Dr. Cicerone said.
About 60 scientists — mainly from academia but including some from industry and federal agencies — run the effort’s scientific side. All have secret clearances. They obtain guidance from the National Academy of Sciences, an elite body that advises the federal government.
Dr. Cicerone said the monitoring effort offered an opportunity to gather environmental data that would otherwise be impossible to obtain, and to do so with the kind of regularity that can reveal the dynamics of environmental change.
It is unclear why the Bush administration cut off this information sharing program. Most people just believe it was because of different priorities. Scientists contend that this data is the only information of its kind to measure melting and freezing in the polar areas, which are considered highly sensitive to global warming.
Some critics feel the C.I.A. needs to stick to spy work and counter-terrorism. Others feel that to discard surplus information that can be used by top security holders in the scientific community is wasteful and that the information should be used. The real questions seem to be: Is our security being compromised? If the answer is no, then this sharing of resources from intelligence gathering seems like a great idea. The more we discover about climate change, the better we can plan for the future, whether the change is man-made or naturally occurring. If we can make discoveries without additional cost, so much the better.
Click for New York Times Article
This definitely makes sense. The CIA has access to imagery that is much higher resolution than commercial satellite imagery. As long as those accessing the imagery have the appropriate clearance it’s definitely fine. I’m a little surprised iti s just Secret clearances. Might be an inaccuracy in the article. I’m pretty sure would be Top Secret clearance for that. Then again Secret wasn’t uppercased, so maybe they were just generically referring to “secret” clearances without really specifying the exact level. I guess I’m nitpicking here.
Security shouldn’t be compromised as long as only those with appropriate clearances access the data. They would know that they have to handle it appropriately, and not dislcose to anyone else. It would be a violation of their clearance, and the penalties for that can be quite severe (i.e. prison time in the most severe cases). I don’t see it as a security risk at all – no more so than anyone else appropriately cleared having access to classified information that he/she has the right clearance for and the “need to know” which is another criteria – just because you have that level of clearance, if you don’t have a “need to know” you shouldn’t see that particular piece of data. That’s called compartmentalization, and is also part of what keeps our classified data secure.
Thanks for your input, GR. You are our security clearance expert! it sounds like a good way to get free data to me.
Take it from me – having a high level security clearance isn’t always what its cracked up to be. Sometimes, some of the stuff I have to go through in my job due to it, I could do without. However, it’s what pays the bills, and in this area, a ticket to good jobs, so it’s worthwhile having one. Otherwise, sometimes it is more of an extreme headache. You have to be really anal about protecting things, and following procedures in classified areas, and opening and closing those areas. I’m the first one in at work so I get to open the classified area, and what an extreme headache that is – lots of documentation, a bunch of combinations to remeber and some extremely finicky combination locks, plus a sequence of events that I need to execute in a 30 second period or else all kinds of hell will be unleashed. It is the morning ritual that I dread. Closing the area is more fun, but I only get to do that on the odd times I’m in late at night or weekends.
Anyway, people with clearances usually have enough fear instilled in them as part of the clearance process to make them protect the information appropriately. You get to sign a bunch of paperwork spelling out the potential consequences for not appropriately protecting information, and it is like signing your life away, basically. Not to mention the every 5 year reinvestigation where they talk to your neighbors, cowokers, etc. I always wondered the last time mine came up 2 years ago – what that must have been like interviewing my neighbors at Point of Woods. Must have been interesting if they visited the flophouse next to mine, what kind of reactions they had to some from Defense Investigative Services (or more likely one of their subcontractors) showing up to ask a bunch of questions about their neighbor! Would have liked to have been a fly on the wall for that one! Having been on the opposite end of that process – that is being interviewed about either a friend or a corworker – they ask some rather creepy questions about what you know about their personal life (any knowledge of extramarital affairs, gambling problems, drinking problems, change in behavior, etc.). I always hate hate hate being interviewed for someone else, which happens all too frequently unfortunately – as they usually hit up coworkers and someone’s clearance is always coming up for reinvestigation.
Anyway, just some of the downsides of having a clearance. Sometimes, you wonder if it’s worth it and if it might not be better to just go back to commercial work. However, my last stint at commercial work was good old WorldCom, so that soured me on the commercial world!
Climate change is a national security issue. Collaborating with academic institutions and private initiatives increases the CIA’s visibility into this issue. If you look closely, you will see several collaborations like this (particularly regarding economics and political science). One “hot” global issue is immigration. As climate change impacts food production and water availability, the threat of mass migrations would significantly destabilize the world economy and security. “Water” will be the sought after commodity in the future (which is why large commercial interests are buying up water rights around the world. China is also buying agricultural rights wherever available (principally Africa) in anticipation of food shortages in the future. People really interested can go to this website for more information http://securityandclimate.cna.org/
This is “spy work”. It’s not all done in the dark.
All the things just described could drastically affect the way things look in the future.
Food and water have causes mass migrations throughout history so I suppose this is nothing new.
China is a huge problem in a whole range of ways. Their economy is growing fast and their dependence on resources is increasing by leaps and bounds. Pollution there in many cities is awful – Beijing being a prime example. The list could go on, but there’s a reason a lot of people are paying more and more attention to China these days. They also are having a bigger and bigger impact on the global economy, and their refusal to let the Yuan float to its true value causes problems on a global scale. The list could go on but that’s just a few things.
So is this a case of our CIA spying on sea lions? Is it distracting them from their business?
So the CIA is sharing data with climate scientists….too bad they’re not sharing with the TSA, huh?
True enough, but the CIA has never cooperated too well with the FBI either, or the NSA at times, for that matter. Too much turf fighting/competition between the agencies.
Gainesville Resident and his working in a classified area gave me a real belly laugh. I wonder if he ever went through all that routine of locking everything up, checking it twice, and setting the alarms, only to discover that he had left his car keys inside the secure room? Only one response to that happenstance, and I might risk censorship if I printed it.
We rarely censor people we like when they cuss outrageously, Wolverine. 😉
@Wolverine
You haven’t really paid your dues in the classified world until you’ve caught your hand in a closing scif door. Fortunately my college ring caught the worse of it… and saved my fingers.
I watched Brennen, Chertoff and Hayden on Meet the Press Sunday. They know just how difficult it really is to share information; however, they gave the usual apologies. It’s easy to “connect the dots” after an event has occurred because you know which dots to look for (in retrospect). Attempting to connect them “real time” is like standing in a snowstorm trying to match snowflakes. While we like to call it a communications problem (and there is a bit of that), it’s really a technology problem (and the sixteen members of the DNI would really like to figure it out).
Haven’t done that, but have left other things that caused me to have to reopen it.
The worst time was early on in one of my first attempts to close the lab on a weekend. The combination lock was finicky in spinning all the way and causing the lock to engage – as to close it – you spin that lock a bunch of times rapidly in one direction – but the thing binds sometimes and you have to repeat the process. I thought it had and stupidly pulled the door slightly to confirm – it hadn’t, and at that point set off the alarm – and the company security guy got paged at home, etc. etc. An embarrassing rookie mistake by me – 6 years back when I first attempted to close the lab.
Yikes! Now, as I’ve said I’ve had some fun times securing the scif – but never had that experience!
I guess there’s a bunch of war stories out there from people who have had fun securing scifs! (shorthand for the classified area we’ve been referring to).
I’m not sure what’s worse, the opening or closing procedure. Although I open the lab far more often than close it, but there’s a limited amount of time from the time I get the door open to the time I get inside and punch the codes to disable the alarm system. That always feels like running some kind of gauntlet. Then again, it’s sort of the reverse for closing, and that’s what tripped me up that time I referred to above.
More fun is securing the scaled down system inside a secure humvee shelter, in the freezing cold and howling winds, as I did a bunch of times in its early deployment out in South Korea in the middle of the winter there. Your hands are numb and you’re trying to spin that combo lock. Not to mention the inside of the shelter is frigid cold – they designed the thing to keep the computers and other electronics nice and cool – forget the comfort of the soldiers (the usual operators of the system). Not to mention that thing is an ergonomic nightmare inside. I laugh every year as we have to take ergonomic training at our company – and for nearly a year I worked most days most of the time inside this cramped dimly lit secure shelter on the back of a Humvee. Was like working in a cave, and I can’t count the number of shirts I tore and the scrapes on my back against the sharp edges of the computer racks. The operator’s chair is really sandwiched in there. The joke at work was because I’m a short/thin person that’s why I was selected to work on that system. Then again some of the soldiers I work with are big beefy guys, you should see them inside this thing. If a photograph could be taken of it, it would make a really funny picture. Unfortunately, not possible due to it being a classified environment. Also, even I cannot stand up completely straight in that shelter without hitting my head on the ceiling. It is a very claustrophobic area.
Just more of the fun of working in crazy classified environments!
One more crazy story about working in the classified shelter on the back of the Humvee. Five years ago when I was still designing and getting the system together – the prototype vehicle was parked right next to our building (as it had to be hooked into the building’s electrical power at that time – the onboard diesel generator wasn’t yet installed by the manufacturer). Anyway, I was working in the shelter, and there was a small fire inside our building and the fire alarm went off and everyone was evacuated. No one thought about me, inside this shelter on the back of the Humvee parked right against the building. The fire company came and put out the fire, and I didn’t discover all of this until I decided to take a break and exit the shelter – and went inside and heard people talking about the “fire”. The building could have burnt down and set the Humvee on fire, for all I know, and no one would have thought to bang on the shelter door and see if I was inside it. Oddly enough, they were supposed to take “attendance” out there of everyone, to make sure everyone was accounted for. Somehow I was forgotten about. It is loud inside there with all the equipment running, it is a steel shelter anyway – you can’t hear any outside noises. For one thing the environmental control system makes a huge racket. Anyway, I was none the wiser the whole time while fire alarms were blaring, the local fire dept. came in with fire engines with sirens going, etc. etc!
Then again an even crazier incident occurred when the prototype system was pressed into service 2 days after Katrina ripped through New Orleans. Me, several soldiers, and the system drove down in a convoy nearly non-stop from Reston to New Orleans – leaving Reston Saturday morning of that Labor Day weekend, and arriving early in the hours of Labor Day. The system was still in protype form and not really all together – but I hurriedly cobbled enough of it together to provide real time aid in the search for survivors. In fact as a footnote the system was credited as saving 85 lives and I have a letter to that affect from a 2 star general. Anyway, getting back to the story – we were located at New Orleans Airport on a taxiway area where a lot of other disaster relief vehicles were placed. I was inside the shelter, when I felt this impact. Someone was trying to drive one of the disaster relief vehicles down this taxiway past all of the parked vehicles, and sideswiped the Humvee. Fortunately, it didn’t do any real damage, but scared the heck out of me.
All part of the fun of working in a very small secure environment on the back of a Humvee. Basically an enclosure not much bigger than 2 phone booths in size, stuff with a huge amount of computers and other electronics equipment (4 floor to ceiling racks filled with equipment). It leaves very little space for people – with an effort two people my size can be in there at the same time with a high degree of discomfort. In practice, it is bad enough even for me by myself in there. Which is why I roll my eyes every time the annual ergnomics certification traning takes place. Your office and computer setup is inspected. I’ve always said, those ergonomics folks would have a heart attack if they saw the environment I had to often work in day in and day out. They were not cleared for access to classified areas however.
Anyway, those are two more stories about working in scifs that come to mind – but in a scif much smaller than most, given that it’s on the back of a Humvee!
I can link a picture of our system of what it looks like from the outside – and you can see the size of the shelter – to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.
If you go to http://peoc3t.monmouth.army.mil/win_t/gbs.html – there’s a photo of two Humvees with a mountain range behind them. The first Humvee is the antenna system built by another company. The 2nd Humvee in that picture is my system. You can see the rectangular metal shelter on the back of the Humvee. THAT is the scif I work in sometimes, and for a period worked in almost full time for a year – spending very little time in my office. Also, I’ve been in the field in the thing as I’ve noted. Anyway, you can see there it is not a huge enclosure. Imagine that there are 4 floor to ceiling racks of electronics equipement in there, with the operator’s chair smack in the middle of the floor. THAT is the fun environment I often work in! Claustrophic? Definitely. Not recommended for those who have a fear of tightly enclosed dark noisy spaces!
And, the article mentions “operators” as in plural. As I said two people can sort of fit in there. Believe it or not – a metal folding chair is lashed to the side of one of the racks, and the 2nd person removes that chair and squeezes it between the door and the other operator’s chair. In practice, I always found that extra metal folding chair to be worthless – I would usually stand behind the soldier being trained on the system, or when I was there in the early days of operation to observe in case anything went awry – that is the soldier did something stupid. You get to know the other person very well being crammed in there like a pair of sardines!
Of course the military specified the size of the shelter, so we were constrained to fit all the electronics equipment inside that size shelter, and leave enough room for someone to operate the thing! As I said, the military only cares that the soldier can peform the job in there, and the equipment is kept nice and cool with the blasting cold environmental control unit! Usually it’s about 60 degrees there, and you sit right below the air outlet for the for the system. It is like sitting next to one of those window air conditioners like people had in houses before central air conditioning came along! As I said, i roll my eyes when my company does the annual ergnomics inspection in our offices and we have to take a multiple guess quiz about a bunch of ergnomics practices.
ergonomics – NOT ergnomics! how I left the “o” out twice in a row is beyond me
Know what you mean, GR. I once opened up, ran for the alarm disable box, and got ready to punch in the code I used every day. Then my mind went totally blank. Darn!! I couldn’t remember that code to save my life. The security response team thought it was really funny.
I can relate Wolverine – I once almost had that happen to me – in the last instant I remembered it in the nick of time. I was glad in my case it didn’t set the alarm off, and as you said giving everyone a good laugh for having some mind blank.
On a final note, another crazy thing was, that I happened to be in Ft. Hood the week before the shooting incident, and my system was located just 1 mile from the incident. If the test had run into the following week, I might well have been there for the incident! I would still have been a mile away – but the base was locked down and I would have been stuck on base until 10 PM that night, if I had been there. I’m glad I missed out on that excitement. I was down at Ft. Hood 4 times the last year – for 1-2 weeks each time, for a huge interoperability test of my system along with roughly 50 other systems.
I could just imagine my being inside the Humvee shelter, and all hell breaking lose on the base – and someone banging on the door – and when I opened the door hearing all kinds of sirens and PA announcements about the base being locked down and everyone needing to go inside buildings, etc. etc. The people I worked with who work there filled me in on what they experienced, being just a mile away from the shooting location. I was glad that I wasn’t there – and the test dates kept sliding around so it could have just as easily worked out that I was there.
Time to go unlock the lab – now I better not have jinxed myself with all this discussion of the fun with the alarm systems in scifs!