The Obama administration has the reputation for being Web 2.0-savvy, and for good reason. Barack Obama’s campaign for the US presidency was notable for its use of social media for organizing and fundraising. Supporters were able to keep track of the candidate through websites like Myspace and YouTube, and were prompted to make cash contributions through mobile phone text messages.

The use of these connection technologies, as some now call them – applications that encourage user collaboration, interaction and contribution – have been carried over to the Obama administration, most notably as part of White House and State Department public diplomacy programs.

In January, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a major address on internet freedom, articulating a US policy that would have the effect of assuring access to internet resources and social media in places like China and Iran, where governments block some content and tools.

“The Chinese bristled at the speech, seeing it as an invasion of their sovereignty,” said Jared Cohen who serves on Clinton’s policy planning staff and advises the secretary of state on the role technology can play in advancing foreign policy objectives. But since the speech, he told ISN Security Watch, Chinese Uighurs have made their presence felt on the internet and have begun advocating for their positions in internet forums.

During the aftermath of last year’s Iranian elections, Cohen himself called Twitter CEO Evan Williams, asking him to keep the site up despite scheduled maintenance so that Iranian dissidents could continue to communicate with the outside world.

Keeping up with the game

But the program to use web tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to influence international public opinion actually found its start in the waning days of the Bush administration, when a team of White House and State Department operatives initiated a program attempting to defeat international terrorists in the same cyber venue in which they had achieved so much success in propagandizing, recruiting, organizing and fundraising.

“It was a source of frustration in the Bush administration that we were being outdone by terrorists by means of a technology that we had developed,” Juan Carlos Zarate, Bush’s deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism, told ISN Security Watch. “Putting out talking points to our ambassadors was not effective when dealing with viral messages emanating from al-Qaida.”

At the initiative of James Glassman, a former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, a program centered at the State Department called Public Diplomacy 2.0 was inaugurated (on Glassman, also read “Are Glassman and Doran right on Iran?” by Daniel Florian). Implicit in the program’s philosophy was the recognition that the US could best al-Qaida in a Web 2.0 setting.

“Standing at a microphone and preaching doesn’t work for us,” Glassman told ISN Security Watch. “Instead, we are facilitating a conversation.

“Anyway, we Americans believe in the marketplace of ideas,” he added. “Our idea was to use technology and social media to promote a conversation in which our views would be aired.”

Al-Qaida was more successful in a Web 1.0 world but suffered when its views were subject to a Web 2.0-type of discussion, noted Zarate. The image of Aiman al-Zawahiri, a top Osama Bin Laden lieutenant, was tainted after an internet discussion of his views “because he could not deal with all the questions about killing Muslims,” he said.

Among other things, Glassman, Zarate and their crew started the first US government social networking site called Exchanges International, dealing with educational exchanges. “It was quite benign,” said Glassman, “but there was definite opposition to it because we could not control this dot-gov site. People could go on and talk about whatever they wanted.”

Control and partnerships

This lack of absolute content control is indeed one of the characteristics of Public Diplomacy 2.0. Another is the forging of partnerships with private-sector, civil society players, whose views align with that of US policy.

“There is a fear that if we can’t control the message, then we are giving the enemy more space to exploit internet tools and propagate their message,” said Cohen. A better approach is to “realize that the 21st century is a terrible time to be a control freak and to understand that maybe we can’t control the message but we can influence it. Technology is not the answer, it is a tool and there is always a risk that comes along with using it.”

The efforts of Glassman and Zarate “planted the seeds” that led to Clinton’s internet freedom address, according to Cohen. “In the last six months of the Bush administration, they began asking questions about how technology can be used as tool to enhance civil society.”

The Bush people were moved in this direction at least in part by the recognition that US government voices were no longer considered credible on the world stage. This led them to seek out voices on the internet that aligned with US policy, said Zarate. Among the voices they found were private, anti-terror groups such as the Alliance of Youth Movements and Sisters Against Violent Extremism.

“These groups were aligned with our interests,” said Zarate, “but they were not the voices of the US government.”

“Governments can best advocate for things like civil rights and against politically motivated censorship by empowering and expanding the discussion to this broader civil society,” said Cohen. “You can think of statecraft as a specialized form of troubleshooting. When you’re troubleshooting anything you want to have as many stakeholders in the room as possible.”

Ultimately, the private sector is an important partner with government in enhancing and preserving internet freedom. “The Google-China issue,” said Cohen, “is an example of the shared responsibility of government and the private sector.”

Spreading technology

For Glassman, the biggest challenge facing Public Diplomacy 2.0 is “spreading the technology.” “The more people in Iran have technology that is working and not blocked by government,” he said, “the better for freedom and democracy in that country but also for American security.”

He sees Public Diplomacy 2.0 as the best hope toward forestalling Iran’s eventual deployment of nuclear weapons. “The chances of a diplomatic solution appear to be slim,” said Glassman. “The chances of military action may be growing every day but are quite frightening. If instead we use tools of public diplomacy and strategic communications to help the Iranian dissident movement, we might not be able to change the regime, but we might be able to change the regime’s behavior.”

About this text: This text was first published by the International Relations and Security Network at the ETH Zurich under a Creative Commons license.

Foto: Jenny Solomon – Fotolia.com

What happens to US intelligence when the president doesn’t like to read?

Producing the President’s Daily Brief degenerates to the level of a tabloid newsroom, with reporters – or in this case, intelligence analysts – scrambling to attract the chief’s attention with sensational stories and headlines.

That, in a nutshell, is what happened during the administration of George W Bush, according to a report released last week by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

The incurious Bush was loathe to immerse himself in details. He also didn’t want to hear about issues, such as climate change, which didn’t interest him.

This shouldn’t come as a big surprise. Bush’s was, after all, an administration that failed to act on intelligence that al-Qaida was about to attack the US, proceeded with an Afghan adventure without an elementary knowledge of the political or human landscape, invaded Iraq on false pretenses, and bungled those overseas operations perhaps beyond repair.

Milking information

The President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, has been considered the premiere analytical product of the US intelligence community since 1964, when it was first presented to then-president Lyndon Johnson. But under Bush, the importance of the PDB soared as never before. Intelligence analysts understandably did what they could to get their issues before presidential eyes.

“A lot of recent media attention has focused on how the intelligence community collects information, and rightly so,” report author Kenneth Lieberthal, director of Brookings’ John L Thornton China Center, told ISN Security Watch. “This report focuses on what you do after you collect the information. How do you effectively milk your information in order to understand better the realities out there and how are you able to take that product and insert it into the policymaking process.”

Under Bush, inserting intelligence into the policymaking process meant inserting it into the PDB, according to Lieberthal. Under Bush, the PDB was elevated “to an unprecedented level of importance,” he said.

This, in turn had the effect of skewing intelligence production “away from deeper research and arms-length analysis to being driven by the latest attention-grabbing clandestine reports from the field.”

Much as a newspaper reporter wants his or her story printed on page one, Bush’s exaggerated reliance on the PDB made getting an item into that document a major career goal of intelligence analysts. “In the CIA,” the report notes, “analysts who got an item into the PDB that President Bush found interesting or useful were rewarded, and the intelligence community as a whole came to see much of their raison d’être as centered on the PDB product each day.”

These attitudes, goals and incentives had the effect of distorting the development of intelligence products to be consumed by the president and other senior policymakers.

“Analysts may define issues in sharper terms than warranted and use somewhat hyperbolic language in order to make the item sexy enough for inclusion in the PDB,” the report said. “The PDB format allows only short items on specific topics. It therefore can skew the type of analysis done in the intelligence community away from the more complex and thoughtful work and presentations that are critical to policymaking.”

In other words, the US intelligence community was, in some perverse way, feeding the president what he was able and willing to digest.

Dubious reality

The tendency of analysts to emphasize information gleaned from classified sources was also problematic and stemmed from the same tabloid atmosphere of sensationalism. Analysts perceived items captured by clandestine means to add value to the story, and this make it more likely to be included in the PDB.

“But such information is often incomplete,” said Lieberthal, “may be less timely than open source materials, lacks important context, and is occasionally of dubious reliability.”

The primacy of the PDB has also had a negative impact on information sharing, an intelligence community value promoted since 9/11. “In some unfolding situations, IC analysts sometimes save useful information for PDB use, and only disseminate it to non-PDB policy users later,” the report found. “Withholding less sensitive information for hours or days so it appears first in the PDB is dangerous.”

Superficial knowledge

If all this were not enough, the report also found that other aspects of US intelligence analysis to be severely wanting.

Of particular relevance to the ongoing fiascoes in Southwest Asia, the report found country knowledge among US intelligence analysts to be superficial. “Many … lack the deep immersion in the country’s political system, economy, and modern history necessary to produce nuanced, insightful analytic products,” the report said.

The National Intelligence Estimates, one of the major analytical products of the intelligence community, “are frequently too late, too long, and too detailed to serve high-level policy makers well,” the report found. The quality of the estimates are also often compromised by the effort to achieve a unified position, “producing reports that can become the lowest common denominator statement that is able to obtain agreement” across the various segments of the intelligence community.

The Brookings report also found that, ever since the Iraq weapons of mass destruction (WMD) fiasco, US intelligence analysts have been gun shy; the analysts are actually refusing to do any analyzing. Instead, the report found “a tendency for analytical products to focus on amalgamating all potentially relevant data and to leave it largely to policy makers to draw the analytic conclusions.”

New direction

The pendulum may now be swinging in the opposite direction under the Obama administration, as the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, announced that opportunity analysis – the identification by analysts of unanticipated windows of opportunity to advance US policies – would become a key component of intelligence products.

The Brookings report noted that presidents take briefings and use intelligence reports in a highly individualistic manner. No doubt, Obama is not relying on the PDB the way Bush did.

But for all of his reliance on the PDB, Bush didn’t always pay heed. After all, what was the PDB headline on 6 August 2001? “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

About the author: Peter Buxbaum, a Washington-based independent journalist, has been writing about defense, security, business and technology for 15 years. His work has appeared in publications such as Fortune, Forbes, Chief Executive, Information Week, Defense Technology International, Homeland Security and Computerworld. His website is www.buxbaum1.com.

About this text: This text was first published by the International Relations and Security Network at the ETH Zurich under a Creative Commons license.

Foto: Daniel Florian, via flickr.com. Lizenz: Creative Commons