We were able to catch up with Mr. Shea a few weeks ago, and he shared with us why he started USGIF and where he sees us going – during a most interesting and challenging time of transition.

(Q) It’s been five years. Congratulations. Before we talk about the accomplishments of the Foundation, why did you create it in the first place?

(A) It really got down to the desire to have a community of interest around geospatial intelligence. I had witnessed a similar construct in the space, intelligence and security communities and my sense was that there was not that same level of camaraderie and relationships that existed between government, industry, academia, the private sector, individuals and trade associations in the geospatial intelligence space. We decided to see if we could get everyone together and step outside of their own needs and desires within their own businesses and agencies to focus on something bigger and more significant.

(Q) From developing the idea of USGIF on a cocktail napkin to where we are today, did you accomplish all of your intended goals and objectives?

(A) While I certainly helped play the role of a catalyst, it is really all about what the community has done as a whole to move things forward. And it has been phenomenal. When the idea was first bounced around with a few people, we originally thought we would pull together 200-250 people and a few keynote speakers to network and discuss ideas, and do something for the betterment of the tradecraft. And today, we just came off of the 5th GEOINT in Nashville with 3,700 attendees, all the key players in industry, government and academia came together…it makes you think “wow, how did we get here.” And, I spoke with the folks who run the Space Foundation – who run the Space Symposium — they are blown away by how far we have come in a short five years. And, they have a 25-year heritage.

(Q) Tell us about some of the key milestones and accomplishments of the Foundation?

(A) This Foundation exists not because of me, or any one person. It exists as a community as whole for the betterment of our tradecraft. And the passing on of my leadership philosophy to Mr. Keith Masback has been a tremendous accomplishment for the Foundation.
Another key milestone is seeing our membership increase over the years. And, it is amazing to see major national agencies like NRO, DIA as well as the U.S. Army become members, and essentially want to be on par with the NGA. It really demonstrates that it is all about a community and not about a particular agency or particular function of an agency or industry member company – it’s much bigger than that.

We have also reached a point where key intel and defense leaders ask us to be speakers – without us soliciting them. They find GEOINT to be a fantastic forum to communicate their messages and visions, and our biggest challenge is managing this influx of requests. So, as I look back on 5 years, there are a number of milestones like these that make you realize just how far we have come in a short amount of time.

(Q) Many folks have told us that geospatial intelligence serves as the “foundation” for all other intelligence functions. Can you tell us your perspective on this?

(A) The original symposium that preceded the GEOINT symposia was the GEOINTEL 2003 Symposium and the theme for that event was “Geospatial Intelligence, The Foundation for Security.” Essentially, you have to know where you are, and every intelligence decision deals with some fundamental location on the earth’s surface…and geospatial intelligence is also the foundation for SIGINT and MASINT, HUMINT and all the other “INTS,” providing the horizontal structure for all intelligence functions. People are now realizing that geospatial intelligence is not a vertical stovepipe, but it is in fact the horizontal function that ties everything together.

The theme for GEOINT 2008 was about transition…where do you see our tradecraft heading?
If you look back on the history of technology, there are the early adopters who embrace niche solutions. Then, these solutions grow and evolve to be ubiquitously deployed, and that is where we are today and where we are he heading. Five years ago, we did not have the technologies we have today. And I think that 5 years from now, geospatial intelligence technologies will be so ubiquitous that they will be a part of everyone’s normal vernacular and the way we think. As a result of that, you will see more young people and college students moving into this field because it offers a unique way of looking at the world. These young people will also accelerate the development and deployment beyond our expectations.

(Q) You are known for being very passionate about the community and the tradecraft. Why the passion? And what got you to where you are today?

(A) Well I am passionate in things I believe in. That is my mantra. First, I believe in the United States of America. If you cut me open, I would bleed red, white and blue. And I believe in the service to our nation and I believe in national security. When I think about geospatial intelligence being the foundation for all of this, how could you not be excited?

I am also passionate because we are on the precipice of a really dramatic change in our world. We have all of these new technologies and we can do better with them. We can save lives, protect our nation, and protect our loved ones. Ultimately, we have to operate as a unified whole, between government and private sector, professional associations…and if we do this and focus on something that is bigger than all of us, it is a very powerful thing…and being on the front-end of this is so energizing that it drives me every single day.

(Q) What do you think the highlight of GEOINT 2008 was?

(A) That is a tough question because there were so many highlights. First, the venue was fantastic. The quality of the speakers was unprecedented – exceeding all expectations in terms of being honest and thought provoking. The quality of the attendees and exhibits was also phenomenal. I spent a significant amount of time on the exhibit floor this year, and was energized by what I witnessed. I also thought Phil Vassar, which was a great way to signify the end of the event and mark our 5th anniversary.

I would really like to reinforce that GEOINT and the Foundation is not a one-man show. When you look back on the Foundation, the heart and soul has always been Aimee Correnti, and when you look back on everything she has done, she deserves a tremendous amount of acknowledgment and accolades. And, the entire USGIF team, our volunteers, as well as the financial support of our members and exhibitors have been a tremendous asset that has facilitated our growth.

One last thing I would like to mention is that these are tough times. We really are in a time of transition with the new administration, the economic markets are in turmoil and we are still fighting the war of terror. I don’t want to see GEOINT 2008 as the “top of our game.” I look to the Foundation, as well as to our members and GEOINT participants, to keep up the energy and focus on how important this mission is…and we need to keep this at the forefront of everything we do.

We caught up with Chris last week – prior to this news leak – and now have his exclusive take on the recent development. We also got his perspective on geospatial intelligence, where the tradecraft is headed, and developments at ERDAS, the company which he is leaving at the end of the week in order to be available for some new horizons …

Q: Tell us about ERDAS and your role within the organization?

A: ERDAS is a really interesting company that was started back in 1978 as the original Landsat imaging processing company. Landsat was the first orbiting multispectral bird out there providing global coverage for general use. It enabled us as a community—remote sensing community—to come together and do things that we only thought we could do in theory; for both civilian and defense/intel purposes. Once you had that sensor out there, you needed a tool that could let folks use the data for practical gain. That was the Earth Resources Data Analysis System [ERDAS]. ERDAS was a start-up that spun out of Georgia Tech, literally in a garage on the campus. And the rest is then history.

ERDAS has grown over the past 30 years to not just do Landsat but to deal with every space-based sensor there is and all the airborne sensors and geospatial data of all kinds, including the National Technical Means that the National System for Geospatial Intelligence [NSG] relies upon. And, ERDAS is no longer just an imagery company. If anything you do ever uses or ends up on a map, you should give ERDAS a call.

My role at ERDAS has been senior vice president for Americas and national programs – it’s kind of a euphemism to address everything from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego and everything requiring a security clearance.

Q: And you are fairly new to the organization, right?

A: I came to ERDAS by way of acquisition last year. Prior to that, I was CEO of IONIC.

The ERDAS IMAGINE tool, which is the heritage of the company, really represents the next generation of multi-source, multi-sensor, net-centric applications that allow users to access imagery and other geospatial data, make this data geospatially accurate, exploit/analyze this data, and generate information products that can support analysts, operators, targeteers, and support personnel in the intelligence community as well as the tactical military community. What tools like IMAGINE have done is helped people harness a whole lot of data for real mission gain. The side effect, however, is that a data management problem has evolved as this data has accumulated.

ERDAS, recognizing this problem, used to point customers to our partners, saying, “Maybe they can solve your data management problems.” It turned out this was unrealistic, so the company decided to build an enterprise spatial data infrastructure product, which we now call our APOLLO Server. Some of this product was built from scratch, but somewhere down the line ERDAS decided to acquire some companies to accelerate that platform development. That is when they acquired IONIC, and I came to the company.

So, I really come from the company not from the remote sensing tradition that I talked about earlier but from a service-oriented architecture tradition; specifically the implementation of Open Geospatial Consortium-compliant web services.

I know that’s a mouthful but it’s something that NGA and the rest of the federal government, and frankly governments around the world, have been investing in over the past 15 years in order to achieve the interoperability, information sharing, data discovery, and geospatial enablement that they have sought within their enterprise.

Q: When you were at In-Q-Tel, what kinds of companies did you all invest in at the time? And what were the key attributes of these companies that made you want to invest in them?

A: If I told you, I would have to kill you—Ha! When I was first came to In-Q-Tel, I was given the task of sitting down with agency [CIA] personnel and defining the CIA’s priority technology challenges in what we called “The Problem Set.” The original In-Q-Tel Interface Center—the “QIC” for short—staff (Sue, Basil, Anne, Rick, Sharon, Kathy) really deserve great credit for this accomplishment, as they had to help tease this information out of one of the most complex and secretive organization on Earth.

It was the first public, unclassified articulation of the agency’s priority technology challenges, which enabled us to “go to market” and engage hundreds, and by now, thousands, of technology companies and organizations that the agency had great difficulty in otherwise engaging. The way they described it was that those were the challenges that they were unable to solve despite all the money, all of skills, and all of the acquisition vehicles—the methods for contracting— available to agency.

The idea was that they would create an organization that had different acquisition characteristics and an external view on the agency, which was “exquisitely tethered”—I believe those were Sue’s words—back to the agency’s needs. Seeing the big IT explosion in the mid to late ‘90s, and realizing that the agency was less and less capable of engaging those smaller start ups, those small businesses, some that couldn’t find the Beltway on a map if they had to. They needed an organization that could engage those companies which was not encumbered in the same ways by the FAR [Federal Acquisition Regulation].

This special problem set gave us the road rules and we immediately got down to business. I think this demonstrated real foresight on the part of George Tenet, Buzzy Krongard, Ruth David, Joanne Isham, and, well, success has many parents.

The types of businesses we were investing in ranged widely, to include those offering technologies in multi-lingual search and retrieval, entity extraction, machine translation, multi-media search and retrieval, high-end information assurance and privacy, data warehousing and data mining, enterprise middleware—for all sorts of purposes, knowledge management, and on and on.

Geospatial intelligence, a term that did not yet exist, did not come to the top of the investment priority list. It wasn’t until late in our problem set definition that one of my agency colleagues thought it important to mention something along the lines of “sometimes we get asked questions about what happened in a particular area of the world at particular moment in time, and it is extremely difficult for us to do this in a timely manner.”
I was dumbfounded. Having grown up watching [Tom] Clancy films and the like, I knew that this could not be true. Let’s just say that after some due diligence, this became one of In-Q-Tel priorities, and it led me personally down a path that I never would have imagined.

The first steps down this path involved investing in “geospatial interoperability”—for lack of a better term—particularly through what is now called the Open Geospatial Consortium, of which I am now on the board. We put out a few million dollars worth of funding into that technical community not only to invest in technologies that might be individually useful to the agency but in a way that would ensure that data from different systems across the agency could dynamically show up on the director’s map.

We saw the OGC as a great context to take out priority problems and challenges and have them executed by industry collaboratively in a context where industry and governments worldwide were already engaged.

Geospatial is one of these things that became a big focus for In-Q-Tel. And, as a result, a number of things came out of that beyond our investment in OGC such as MetaCarta and Keyhole, which ultimately became Google Earth. OGC continues to yield an evolving standards-based architecture that has come to integrate real-time sensor networks and more. In my opinion, these technologies have really changed the way that we do business but still hold the promise of transforming the enterprise fundamentally.

Q: There was a significant focus on interoperability at the GEOINT Symposium. Tell us what was happening on the exhibit floor at GEOINT.

A: I think there are a lot of different things on the floor at GEOINT. You have software providers. You have solutions providers. You have professional services organizations that when you go in their booth they are demonstrating that they have a track record of dealing with a multitude of technology. The GEOINT Symposium really has evolved into the premiere intelligence conference and is something I am proud to be associated with.

As you would suspect at the GEOINT Symposium you see a lot of people putting things on a map. The interesting part is how things got on that map. I can’t emphasize this enough. Sometimes it is a file sitting on a laptop being visualized on an application running local on that laptop. Sometimes the data is served from the other side of the world or 10 servers from all over the world on 10 different vendors’ platforms from 10 different operating systems with the data in many different formats and the data “magically” shows up on your map.

Those are two radically different worlds, and I’d say at the GEOINT Symposium you see the entire continuum because in reality our customers need a wide range of different kinds of solutions. However, the National System for Geospatial Intelligence is working hard to achieve this world of massively distributed, secure, net-centric spatial data infrastructure where all their business data, or mission data, is laid out upon more traditional geospatial data—whether it be imagery, maps, features, etc.—by authoritative data stewards in a time dominant fashion.

So at GEOINT see a lot of different things. But especially within interoperability demonstration and the participating vendor booth, you are seeing the use of the standard web services architecture that we invested in at In-Q-Tel, and which NGA, ArmyTEC and other DoD elements have continued investing in to this day.

You often have GEOINT attendees, and I think this is common around the defense and intelligence communities, that think about intelligence from a policy, organizational or political science sort of way—which I can say lovingly, since I have a Ph.D. in political science—and I believe this worldview is important. But in the end, the mechanics of our national intelligence and defense intelligence infrastructure require that everything be put on a map. And I think that one of our big struggles in our defense/intelligence community is that we have not yet reconciled the actual organizational imperative to have all of our data, all of our observations, all of our knowledge managed in a spatial/temporal context on your map.

We haven’t reconciled that imperative with a commitment across the entire defense/intelligence community to expose all of our data as I described earlier. Right now the mode we are in is the next necessary step in our evolution; to say NGA is in charge of geospatial intelligence just as NSA is in charge of signals intelligence and CIA is in charge of human intelligence and we all rely on NGA for maps.

I think that has been important because NGA has great geospatial assets that need to be made available to the community as described above. But at the same time every single defense and intelligence agency in the United States—and across our commonwealth partners and coalition partners—needs to be managed geospatially and needs to be published with these standard web service interfaces, of course accounting for the need to know, which is another problem that many do not understand has been solved. Without this, we as a community will not achieve the level of time dominant targeting, operations, analysis and support that we require.

Q: You spent some time at GEOINT week before last. What were some of the big takeaways for you?

A: It is interesting to see how the generations interact. As a relatively young guy, though I have been feeling old lately, and being relatively new to the scene, I only have one decade under my belt, it is priceless to observe the interaction of folks that have spent decades establishing the system that we currently have and have given us the capabilities that we have. There is great knowledge at the top of where the next logical steps are, from the standpoint of doctrinal evolution. I think General [James] Clapper’s presentation was a great example of this sort of knowledge. But then, I think there is a little bit of looking around and going “Where is the next round of ideas that are going to get us there?”

I see the same sort of thing go on at the USGIF’s GEOINTeraction Tuesday events, where folks like Pete Rustan, Kevin Meiners, John Goolgasian, and others show up and share their challenges, and openly state that there is a need for this next round of ideas and technologies to be introduced. They all understand that the defense/intelligence community is a technology intensive enterprise in which good people struggle valiantly—whether in targeting, operations, analysis or support—to get their jobs done with tools that are not necessarily their friends.

As has always been the case, frankly, the younger generation is more engaged at the technology level, focused on tomorrow’s technology. We see where these new technologies can be inserted quickly in a cost effective manner to achieve real mission gain. I think one of the biggest challenges we face as a community is how to marry these generational viewpoints; to have tomorrow’s technologies applied today to the doctrinal shift that we know is not only imminent but absolutely necessary for mission success.

For me, that’s probably the most interesting aspect of the GEOINT Symposium every year.

Q: As a board member of USGIF, please tell us what you think the Foundation has achieved in the last 5 years and where do you think it is heading?

A: I always like to say that USGIF is about three things: community, interoperability and tradecraft. From a community perspective, the Foundation has clearly done a great job in building up the community beyond our wildest imagination. And frankly, I believe there is still great untapped growth potential as everyone comes to realize that when you catch bad guys, you do it by having your mission data on maps. The creation of the GEOINT Symposium, the mid-year Tech Days event with the classified day at NGA, GEOINTeraction Tuesday and other related community-building events are amazing. I’d say the Foundation has achieved its first goal of community building.

Second, interoperability. Why have a community of technology and services providers if their technologies and solutions aren’t going to work together? Or if it will be chronically difficult to bring data together from these different systems in order to do your job? I think from its inception, USGIF has recognized this issue and has played a significant role in facilitating interoperability while bringing community together. Otherwise, USGIF members would just be selling the defense and intelligence communities a bunch of technological stovepipes that can never interact—and that would be a bad thing. We have all lived that nightmare for far too long. USGIF’s commitment to interoperability has been a good thing and certainly accelerated the adoption of OGC web services within NGA and across the NSG. You cannot have a GEOINT community without interoperability.

The third area, which also was a key foundation element when USGIF was established, is tradecraft. By tradecraft we mean all of the skills, know-how, sources and methods that are applied everyday in the trade of geospatial intelligence to get actionable intelligence.

There is a huge generation shift here. If you look at the demographics of who is in the community you’ll see a two-humped camel. There you have folks nearing retirement who have a treasure-trove of knowledge of how to do amazing and often esoteric things. Because of historic recruitment and hiring patterns, there is a dip in the middle, and then there is this younger generation—many coming in after 9/11 with an explosion of recruitment—who don’t have the institutional knowledge, but have a zeal to embrace many of the newer technologies.

In this context, the focus on tradecraft by USGIF is imperative and will see increased focus in the coming year. Some of the steps we’ve taken include the USGIF Accreditation and Certificate Program for colleges and universities to accredit their geospatial programs. This results in a GEOINT certificate that students can pursue, which beyond its educational merits, signals to employers that these students have critical skills that will allow them to rapidly absorb this tradecraft and quickly begin contributing to the mission.

This is just one of the many undertakings of USGIF with regard to tradecraft. Keith Masback, who joined us rather recently as the new USGIF president, is making this his No. 1 priority. The big focus in 2009 and 2010 will be on tradecraft, which is naturally tied to the current state of technology. So naturally, interoperability and community will be a part of this.

Q: Thank you for that perspective, Chris. Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to leave with us?

A: One would hope that this is an area that the transition to the next administration there would place a lot of focus on. I think the current generation of leaders focusing on GEOINT in the functional manager role is important. But we can’t underestimate the power of all the defense and intelligence agencies committing to spatially and temporally enabling their organizations and activities. It would be nice if during transition proper focus could be placed on the geospatial transformation of all intelligence rather than simply focusing on the established functional managers as we have.

I think there is a lot of untapped power there and we could achieve a lot. And, the incoming president should demand nothing less.

[Asked later …]

Q: Speaking of transition, there is talk of you as a dark horse candidate for the position as Director of the CIA. How did this come about and what do you think about your chances of getting the job?

A: Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to gotgeoint.com.

This person has demonstrated a lifetime of dedication to the tradecraft and whose accomplishments serve as an example to others. And, some highly esteemed members of our community have received this award in the past, including Dr. Leo Hazlewood, Mr. William Allder Jr., The Honorable Jeffrey K. Harris and The Honorable James R. Clapper Jr.

This year, we bestowed this award on Evan Hineman, a gentleman who has a history of leadership roles serving in both private industry and governmental positions that have essentially shaped and established our GEOINT tradecraft.

Prior to serving in the private industry for the past 20 years with companies ManTech and TASC (now part of Northrop Grumman IT), he held positions in the U.S. Government for 33 years. From serving on the National Imagery Agency task force, which established the foundation for what eventually became NIMA, to holding leadership positions at the CIA and NRO, Mr. Hineman has played an influential role in shaping what we do today.

You have had a very distinguished career in the intelligence community. Give us your perspective on the history of the tradecraft and how we got to where we are today?

To really understand where we are today, you have go back to the 1950s and picture the world as it was then. The former Soviet Union was the dominant adversary to the U.S. with its closed borders, and President Eisenhower wanted to understand what was happening behind those borders. So early intelligence work started with balloons that were met with limited success. Then the U-2 came along had much more success in gathering intelligence across those borders, and this was when I started in the business.

Then, we progressed into the space world with the Corona and our intelligence capabilities evolved very quickly. Back then I might add that we had our first version of imagery analysts, which we called photo interpreters (PIs). Then, the vision of combining the imagery people with the mapping people started to take hold in the early 1990s. Then, in the mid-1990s, many entities came together to form a study that basically brought the idea of NIMA to life.

From there, the concept of geospatial intelligence took on a new life. And, when you think about it everything happens somewhere and at sometime on the globe and you can put geospatial intelligence as the focal point to pinpointing these events.

Where do you see the tradecraft heading during, what many say is a time of transition?

We have to get to the point where all the information that comes from the intelligence collection/mapping world is readily and easily available to customers. When I say customers I mean the White House, Congress, military leaders and the actual war fighter. We need to get to the point where we can log into a web service and gain access to information — whether it is a set of coordinates, information on a town or region – as opposed to calling in or sending a message for information. We need to let the information flow to the people who need it, and not worry about dissemination, but have the information at the fingertips of the people who need it most.

What role do you see geospatial intelligence playing in the intelligence community and for national security as a whole?

Geospatial intelligence is the knowledge base for everything and serves as the ultimate foundation, in my opinion. As I mentioned earlier, everything happens somewhere and at sometime, and everything that you do has a place and a time involved with it. Geospatial intelligence is the source for tracking all of this and is imperative to our national security.

You have received a number of awards, including being names one of the fifty Trailblazer awards for your services to the CIA, the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the NRO’s Distinguished Service Medal, and two National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medals. How does it feel to receive all of this industry recognition and what does the USGIF Lifetime Achievement Award mean to you?

It is always rewarding to be honored and know that people appreciate what you have done in your career. At the time, each of those awards meant a lot and still mean a lot today. The Trailblazer award was very special because they only picked 50 people, out of many thousands, to honor at the 50th anniversary of the CIA.

I am honored to receive the USGIF Lifetime Achievement Award, and it was very special for me to bring my family to Nashville and accept the award in person. It was really humbling to get this award, and I put this up with the Trailblazer award.

Your acceptance speech at GEOINT 2008 was very moving. Tell us more about the need for young people to be involved in our community.

Thank you. It was very special for me and, as I mentioned in my speech, it is vital to get young people involved in our community. We need to give them the proper training, education and get out of the way, and let them do what they want with their talents. By doing this, we help remove the bureaucracy that happens in our community – and in the private sector — and it allows young people to innovate and be energized about our community.

What brought you into this industry, and why the passion? Why do you wake up everyday and do what you do?

Let me tell you. It just gets into your blood. When I graduated from college, I went to work at Pratt & Whitney and I was going to help build aircraft engines. I worked for three months, then my ROTC commitment came and I went to serve in the military, and I had to go to Aberdeen to train, and I learned that there was a course called Technical Intelligence. They taught you about weapons, and how to speak Russian, and it sounded more interesting than learning how to fix tank engines. I was assigned to Huntsville Alabama and watched the beginning of the space age, and I just got the bug. And I was fortunate to have interesting and challenging jobs with people who taught me a lot and mentored me.

And, when I get up in the morning, I never wish that I was doing something else. It’s something I really enjoy doing…I have told people that, no matter what business they are in, if they if they wake up in the morning not looking forward to what they will be doing, they are in the wrong job. And, I have never felt that way. I have always enjoyed what I do.

We are excited to have the Honorable James R. Clapper Jr., Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (USD(I)), as our very first high-level interview/feature for got geoint?. General Clapper spoke with the editorial staff of got geoint? just prior to the 2008 GEOINT Symposium, where he also will be a keynote speaker.

Gen. Clapper has been called the “father” of GEOINT and we were honored that he shared his vision on the history and future of the geospatial intelligence tradecraft.

Some would call you the “father” of GEOINT. What is your perspective on where we’ve been since the idea of GEOINT was “born”?

While I appreciate the moniker of being called the “father” of GEOINT, it wasn’t a new idea on my part. The founding “fathers and mothers” in the early 1990s actually had the vision behind the formation of GEOINT, which was the marriage of mapping, charting and geodesy with imagery analysis and intelligence. And this is a classic case of the sum of the melding being much more than the actual parts.

Regarding my evolution into GEOINT, I was initially quite stuck by a report done by the NIMA [National Imagery and Mapping Agency] Commission published circa December 2000. And, I actually came on as the NIMA Director two days after 9-11, which was an interesting and challenging time to start as the director of this agency. And it soon became evident that GEOINT was a compelling and useful idea when it was effectuated. And, our first challenge was Afghanistan – when we essentially began the marriage of the two disparate disciplines into what we informally called geospatial intelligence.

Then in January 2002, we hosted a significant off-site retreat where the agency’s leadership decided to bring the National Imagery and Mapping Agency into one functional agency, as opposed to being two disparate functions. This ultimately laid the foundation for renaming the agency and for where we are today. In my almost five years with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency [NGA], we worked hard to promote the concept of geospatial intelligence as a unified discipline.

And Vice Admiral [Robert] Murrett has done a great job of continuing the institutionalization of our discipline. And events like the GEOINT symposia have certainly played a major role in further pushing our tradecraft forward.

Speaking of the GEOINT symposia, you’ve also been at the GEOINT Symposium since its beginning. As we head into our 5th GEOINT Symposium, can you tell us what your vision for the GEOINT tradecraft where is it heading?

I think the growth of the Foundation, as well as the annual increase in attendance and exhibitors at GEOINT is emblematic of the overall growth of our tradecraft.

What is shaping the direction of our tradecraft is the fundamental premise that everyone has to got to be someplace on the Earth. And that is why geospatial intelligence is the obvious common denominator for all of the other layers of intelligence. Information can be overlaid over that basic geospatial intelligence foundation … to the extent that you can update it … and make it available pervasively to users and customers. And that is the vector that I see the tradecraft heading toward.

Going back to what you said earlier about the direction of the tradecraft, what role, if any, do you see geospatial intelligence capabilities or solutions playing in the areas or of cyber, biometrics, and space? Is there an intersection?

Having the geospatial intelligence foundation as common denominator – whether its cyber, biometric or space – for portraying and visualizing other forms of information and intelligence is one of the greatest strengths of our tradecraft.

Again, the notion that everyone has to be some place plays heavily in our tradecraft. And there is a useful intersection of SIGINT and GEOINT, which plays out effectively and very compellingly in Iraq and Afghanistan. I just returned from a week and half trip there and saw many graphic examples of the intersection of all intelligence disciplines being brought together in a very effective way – in the war on terrorism and the prosecution of what we are doing in both of those countries.

In your role as the USD(I), what role do you see geospatial intelligence playing for the defense intelligence community?

I see geospatial intelligence as the foundation for other intelligence disciplines. Others are also recognizing the growing value that geospatial intelligence provides as a discipline. And, the manifestation of that is the tremendous outreach that NGA has undertaken in terms of embedding with both sister agencies or customers.

Let’s talk about this new social media/Web 2.0 landscape that is coming into our community. We have A-Space, Intellipedia, and of course, USGIF’s new unclassified blog, “got geoint?” Do you see these types of – user generated forums – a step forward for information sharing?

Absolutely. This is the wave of the future, and something that geezers like myself may find a bit intimidating, but I certainly see the tremendous value in it. From promoting the collaboration and interactions for any number of users – where you can create perpetuate, expand and contract communities of interest as well as promote informal and the not-so-informal dialogue, among various analytic centers forms this social media world and it is the future.

What do you hope to achieve or what are you most looking forward to at GEOINT this year?

I think the GEOINT symposia are a great snap shot in time where the agencies and its partners get together we come together, collaborate and determine where we are going from a technology perspective. And, hope to play an active part of this dialogue this year.