Information Technology Reference
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since it should relieve the analyst from the burden of searching and aggregating any
pieces of information meaningful and useful for the target. The experience gained in the
past has shown that intelligence work can demand intuitive capabilities and state-of-the-
art insight.
Query and Reporting tools should facilitate intelligence analysts in following, without
technical burdens, their intuition and train of thought by enabling hypotheses to be
postulated and evaluated against knowledge produced, by providing positive or negative
responses to their postulated hypotheses and by suggesting singular details and/or
exceptions for new hypotheses.
Possibly no system can generate hypotheses automatically or can be flexible enough to
capture the dynamic nature or the predictive content of intelligence problems. In contrast,
human analysts have an amazing sensitivity to new situations and are capable of
postulating new scenarios which have never occurred before. For this approach, a strong
improvement and enrichment of the existing Q&R tools (OLAPs, Data Mining) should
be envisaged in order to achieve the best integration between analyst and system and in
order to gain the advantage of its synergy.
4.
SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE RELATIONSHIP
It has already been mentioned, as investigations into global terrorism have
demonstrated, that Al Qaeda has acquired skill in advanced communication technologies
and in hacking techniques. It has also been stressed that the openness of intelligence
systems must be protected by robust security measures.
It is well known that ICT security is a must for open networks; security procedures and
appliances are available for every tailored implementation. Unfortunately existing
security measures cannot totally reduce the risk. New threats and vulnerabilities are
discovered every day and management security services must be activated in order to
detect tentative intrusions and arrange proactive protection and security re-tuning.
Balancing openness and security can be a hard task for every security administrator.
Intrusion detection systems can signal a large amount of anomalies which need to be
evaluated for corrective action. Dedicated intelligence systems are starting to be
introduced in order to manage the intrusion detection data and the network functions and
to find the best solutions to the security administrator for a timely updating of security
policy.
5.
CONCLUSIONS
The process of analysing a huge amount of data and transforming information into
knowledge can be achieved by means of complex technologies tailored to the specific
requirements of the end users.
Since the new global terrorism has demonstrated the skill and the capability to use
public infrastructures which remain largely unknown to the general public, it is of
paramount importance to cope with this challenge by the most proper and powerful
weapons, i.e., Intelligence and Security. The new advanced Intelligence and Security
application tools are mutually strengthened and can strongly improve infrastructures
dedicated to counter-terrorism and Information Warfare.
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