Intelligence analysis

Intelligence analysis is the process of taking known information about situations and entities of strategic, operational, or tactical importance, characterizing the known, and, with appropriate statements of probability, the future actions in those situations and by those entities. The descriptions are drawn from what may only be available in the form of deliberately deceptive information; the analyst must correlate the similarities among deceptions and extract a common truth. Although its practice is found in its purest form inside national intelligence agencies, its methods are also applicable in fields such as business intelligence or competitive intelligence.

Overview

Intelligence analysis is a way of reducing the ambiguity of highly ambiguous situations, with the ambiguity often very deliberately created by highly intelligent people with mindsets very different from the analyst's. Many analysts prefer the middle-of-the-road explanation, rejecting high or low probability explanations. Analysts may use their own standard of proportionality as to the risk acceptance of the opponent, rejecting that the opponent may take an extreme risk to achieve what the analyst regards as a minor gain. Above all, the analyst must avoid the special cognitive traps for intelligence analysis projecting what she or he wants the opponent to think, and using available information to justify that conclusion. Albert Einstein said "God is subtle, but he is not malicious", but the opponents of intelligence agencies may have very different value systems. To assume that one's enemies try to confuse is not being paranoid but realistic, especially in the areas of intelligence cycle security and its subdiscipline counterintelligence. During World War II the German word for counterintelligence art was Funkspiel, or radio game—not a game in the sense of playing fields, but something that draws from game theory and seeks to confuse one's opponents.