The report, “Navigating the Intelligence Community IT Roadmap,” analyzes key challenges facing the IC and outlines how existing and tested technology capabilities can help IC components gain a strategic advantage over adversaries.

The report’s timely release aligns with the IC’s five-year IT roadmap, which seeks to advance intelligence operations by promoting seamless collaboration, enhanced data sharing and management and the ability to deploy the newest tech innovations rapidly.

The report highlights a variety of currently available technical capabilities developed by GDIT as part of its long-standing work to support the U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, including:

• DeepSky — a private, multi-cloud, on-prem data center environment developed and maintained by GDIT that facilitates the testing of emerging technology and security capabilities from multiple providers in collaboration with government agencies and their partners. “It’s really difficult to ingest massive amounts of data from a bunch of tools and make it usable for an engineer, an analyst or an executive. So DeepSky helps make those tools work together,” says Ryan Deslauriers, director of cybersecurity at GDIT.

• Mission Partner Environments — a new generation of interoperable networking and data exchange environments. Originally designed to allow military units to exchange data with specific partners, these expanded information-sharing environments enable the selective yet secure sharing of sensitive and classified information with trusted military and coalition partners. MPEs make it possible to take a “full report, break out what can and can’t be released, and push it to the appropriate network virtually and automatically so that information gets to relevant users where they are in a timely fashion,” explains Jennifer Krischer, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who now serves as vice president for defense intelligence at GDIT.

• Raven — a mobile command center tech suite developed by GDIT that fits in the back of a truck. It extends and deploys the data mesh concept to mobile environments. It can be utilized for disaster relief, special forces operations, or disconnected environments, enabling operators to collect and disseminate data from the tactical edge directly to users on the ground and back to the enterprise. Raven is an example of how GDIT “enables teams to conduct their mission without having to develop, build, maintain, and operate the services internally,” notes Nicholas Townsend, senior director at GDIT.

• Federated Data Fabric — creates a unified data environment through a centralized service platform designed to streamline data curation, management, and dissemination and enable seamless access to data independent of its source or security level. It allows users on the network’s edge to discover, request, publish and subscribe to information within a federated network environment.

Workforce commitment

The report also highlights GDIT’s distinctive approach to hiring and training professionals with extensive defense, IC, and technical experience who uniquely understand the needs of the government’s mission.

“Our workforce two to five years from now will need to be different from what it is today and prepared to take advantage of new technology,” notes Chaz Mason, mission engineering and delivery lead at GDIT. Recognizing this, GDIT doubled its investment in tuition and technical training programs in 2023. More than 20,000 employees have taken at least one of our cyber, AI, and cloud upskilling programs, he said.

GDIT’s staff currently numbers 30,000 professionals supporting customers in over 400 locations across 30 countries; 25%+ of the workforce are veterans.

Read more about how GDIT’s vendor-agnostic technology and decades of government customer experience can help achieve the Intelligence Community’s data-sharing vision.

This article was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and DefenseScoop and sponsored by GDIT.

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“The intent is always to make sure that what we do is transparent,” Michaela Mesquite, the acting chief for ODNI’s nascent Augmenting Intelligence using Machines (AIM) group, told DefenseScoop. 

She said the organization essentially leads and handles oversight for all AI capabilities across the entire enterprise. A longtime federal official and analyst, Mesquite played a leading role in ODNI’s recent development of its AI ethics framework.

During a panel discussion about operationalizing AI ethics in the military and intelligence domains at the Advantage Defense and Data Symposium on Thursday, she hinted at some of the next steps her team is pursuing when it comes to ensuring the responsible use of machine learning and other emerging technologies across the IC.

“AIM is focused very much on this governance piece. Knowing that we’ve had the ethical principles and an AI ethics framework for a while — there’s a lot more policy coming, and a new strategy coming, and governance structures to be stood up. So, we are busy,” Mesquite said.  

Although she didn’t go into much detail about those unfolding standards and policy-making endeavors during the panel, Mesquite did note that the overarching intention is to guarantee everyone in the IC — not just technology developers, but acquisition experts and all other end users — has a strong grasp on what AI capabilities are appropriate and useful or inappropriate for their jobs. 

“How do we make sure we are looking at the breadth of the policy to make sure our entire organization is mature enough to think about, fully, what is an effective use and appropriate use, and therefore already embedded is the ethical use — because if it’s effective, if it’s appropriate, it’s already going to be ethical. So how do we do that? We get to make our own IC AI policy for this,” she said.

In a sideline conversation after her panel, Mesquite briefed DefenseScoop regarding the ongoing process and what this work really looks like on the ground.

“[ODNI has] a policy team. It’s their job to write these policies. And because this is such a touchy [topic] — these are big deals, right — they do it in their own sort of ‘black box’ and there are process protections around it. So, we [the AIM group] bring the expertise and ideas to inform them,” she explained.

“There are a very limited number of policy instruments. Of those policy instruments, there’s directives, guidance, standards and memorandums. So, first, we have to have the directive part — then everything hangs off of that,” Mesquite told DefenseScoop.

She declined to provide a time frame for when an initial AI policy directive for the intelligence community will be completed.

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A new study directed by ODNI seeks to “examine ways to overcome barriers to use of commercial remote sensing/space-based data and analytic services in the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense,” according to a request for information posted to Sam.gov on Monday.

Responses to the RFI are intended to help the IC and Pentagon identify those barriers, and they could assist the organizations in developing solutions and inform future funding decisions, the document added.

The office is specifically interested in two capabilities: commercial overhead data and commercial overhead analytic services.

The RFI defines commercial overhead data as “unprocessed and/or processed signals or images” purchased from a space-based provider in industry, including radio frequency data, communications intelligence, electronic intelligence and geolocation.

Overhead analytics services are the “products, analytics, or services derived using space-based commercial remote sensing capabilities,” which could include geospatial information derived or not derived from images, as well as finished analytics and products, according to the document.

In recent years, the Defense Department has worked to break down bureaucratic barriers in order to take advantage of capabilities available in a burgeoning commercial space industry. The Space Force in June broadened its Commercial Services Office to maximize opportunities for partnering with vendors, and it’s collaborating closely with the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, according to the Space Force.

At the same time, members of the intelligence community run a Commercial Space Council focused on leveraging commercial satellite data, analysis and services. 

“Although it is the policy of the United States to eliminate impediments to the timely delivery of space capabilities and accelerate the use of commercial capabilities, frequently commercial industry encounters challenges to working with the U.S. government and spending on commercial analytic products remains relatively small compared to spending on commercial satellite data,” the RFI said. 

The office is asking industry to respond to a survey of 13 questions by Sept. 22. The queries are intended to solicit details about the specific challenges that have occurred while working with the Defense Department and intelligence community, how cybersecurity requirements influence contracting, what artificial intelligence and machine learning tools responders are using, and more.

ODNI may hold an invitation-only focus group to discuss the topic more in depth based on the number of responses, according to the notice. 

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During an event hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, she spotlighted those three nations’ recent models and methods for deploying and exporting capabilities to facilitate dictatorial practices. New frameworks and “built-in” technology standards will be needed to promote stronger resilience against those growing threats, she suggested.

“In my view, the intelligence community is a critical ally in the fight against authoritarianism and should contribute to the promotion of norms that help to protect against the primary tools of digital authoritarianism and repression, which are censorship, misinformation and disinformation, mass surveillance and invasive spyware used to suppress public debate,” she said. 

Each year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) conducts and releases a report on worldwide threats to U.S. national security. Haines confirmed the latest review, launched in March 2023, was the first annual threat assessment to devote an entire section to digital authoritarianism.   

“We need to move with urgency. During the coming years, we can expect that governments will grow more sophisticated in their use of existing repressive technologies — and they’ll learn quickly how to exploit new and more intrusive technologies, particularly automated surveillance and identity resolution techniques,” she said.

Recent assessments show that foreign governments are already using digital information and communication technologies to monitor and suppress political debate domestically, as well as in their expatriate and diaspora communities abroad. As these technologies, policies and mechanisms are exported and proliferate globally, democratic governance efforts will likely erode, she added.

According to ODNI’s latest evaluations, capabilities and approaches for monitoring and limiting dissent “are on a trajectory to become even more pervasive, targeted and complex in the next few years,” Haines noted. She also pointed to predictions that “generative artificial intelligence will only increase the sophistication that such regimes can use to deploy such tools, making them that much more difficult to counter.”

Generative AI is an emerging subfield of the technology underpinning the making of large language models that can generate audio, code, images, text, videos and other content when prompted by humans. ChatGPT, which has made headlines and exploded in popularity, is one prominent example of generative artificial intelligence technology.

From Haines’ perspective, these nascent but rapidly evolving tools are “making it easier to be surprised by significant developments” for members of the intelligence community. 

“And there’s just no question that with generative AI you can be far more sophisticated in your production of misinformation and disinformation,” she said.

China, Russia, Iran — and now, increasingly other nations — are also using internet disruptions as a tactic to silence dissenters or repress certain communities, she noted. Often, they’ll do so during protests or elections.

“In fact, last year, governments and other actors shut down the internet at least 187 times in 35 countries, which was a new record,” Haines confirmed. 

While highlighting what ODNI views as the Chinese, Russian and Iranian models for applying technology-based mechanisms for control within and beyond their own borders, Haines called China “the global leader in digital repression.” Beijing “has a comparative advantage in the global export of facial recognition and AI,” she noted. Moreover, “autocracies and weak democracies are more likely to acquire this technology from China than from other countries,” Haines said, including during periods of political unrest.

Broadly, the national intelligence chief expressed her team’s desire to help prompt innovative thinking on technical standards, frameworks and more intuitive design approaches that can incorporate and promote “resilience” practices aligned with freedom of expression and open governance.

“We have a lot of ‘building into our design’ for cybersecurity that we’re trying to promote. You should also be doing that for democratic resilience, in a sense, right?” Haines said.

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“USDI&S and ODNI have established a joint team that’s kind of looking into the security of the mobility systems,” Johanna ‘Jojo’ Leasiolagi said during Federal News Network’s virtual Cloud Exchange on Thursday. 

Leasiolagi, a senior technical advisor for the Defense Intelligence Agency, went into deeper detail about that ongoing review in a discussion with DefenseScoop on Friday.

Cloud services, which are essentially delivered on-demand via the internet, mark a major enabler of DIA’s unfolding pursuit to modernize its legacy, secretive Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System, or JWICS, network. Through multi-vendor, multi-award contracts including the Pentagon-wide Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) and the intelligence community’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E), DIA can choose from and is engaging with several large cloud service providers.

At the event Thursday, Leasiolagi said the agency is currently working with its various programs offices to identify “efficiencies, where it makes sense” to set up different cloud access points globally.

“It’s kind of like a co-location of sorts, where customers can have better access to all of the different services that will be available — that way there is no confusion on having one service over here and another one over there,” she noted.

DIA officials are aware of and accept risks associated with the agency’s complex shift to the cloud. 

On that note, Leasiolagi pointed to reports of a recent incident where a misconfigured cloud server connected to Special Operations Command left some data — which was unclassified but included some officials’ personal information — exposed publicly online for weeks.

“We just saw this last week, with the leak of some of the email services, right? So just because we’re moving to the cloud does not mean that we no longer have risks and that it’s on the cloud service providers. It’s a partnership here, where they also have a part of the infrastructure that they have to secure and we also, as customers, have our responsibilities to secure,” she said.

“And so if we continue to work together, having a better visibility into what each other does in the community” is necessary, Leasiolagi added, saying it could help strengthen “the entire system architecture.” 

She advocated for a cloud strategy that encompasses end-to-end security.

With the enhanced mobility and more widely available network services DIA envisions in migrating to the cloud, surfacing information-governing issues must also be confronted in the near term.

“That is actually something that we’re exploring right now,” Leasiolagi noted — pointing to that USDI&S and ODNI joint team now “looking into the security of the mobility systems.”

“It goes beyond just a technical area, but it also goes into governance and policies. As you know, tactical systems have to be mobile, so they have to be able to work anywhere in the world,” she explained. 

However, “if you look at data governance” today, privacy laws differ across the world. This could essentially “mean that if you are in a certain area of a country, the laws in there, locally, mandate that that data can be reviewed by either the local government or someone else,” Leasiolagi said during the event.

In her view, “one of the biggest challenges is understanding the policies and the laws that regulate the data at that location — the visibility, the security, and how do we protect it? How do we make sure that that is our data, and then no one else is going to look at it, and that whenever we need it, we can get it back?” 

She also suggested a memorandum of understanding or other agreements between parties involved regarding data sovereignty and security could stem from the joint team’s work.

Leasiolagi provided more details about those activities on Friday, in response to a request for further information from DefenseScoop.

When asked to define “mobility systems” in this context, she spotlighted the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Strategic Plan in support of the Hosting and Compute Center (HaCC), noting there “mobility, sometimes referred to tactical edge or tactical communications, describes a wide range of systems that ‘enable a mobile workforce; deliver modern secure IT solutions that facilitate delivery of [Defense Department] mission applications to the endpoint at all classification levels.’” 

“These could be government cellphones, laptops, ships, or aircraft as examples,” Leasiolagi said. 

On the definition, she also mentioned the DOD’s overarching objectives to “have global accessibility to the right data at the time of need.”

According to Leasiolagi, studies into how the broader IC and DOD communities can support global cloud connectivity have been around for a few years — and particularly as each new service “comes online” with C2E, JWCC and other network modernization contracts.

“Most recently DISA, [USDI&S] and ODNI have focused more on JWCC to ensure we are coordinating how services will begin to be delivered and interconnected. I participate in a few key groups to help coordinate DIA actions — though I believe that each agency’s communication team would be best postured to share information on relevant studies and meetings they are leading,” she told DefenseScoop.

Spokespersons from ODNI and USDI&S did not respond to DefenseScoop’s questions on the new joint team by publication.

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That assessment by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., was shared by the heads of all the major American intelligence agencies and, Warner said, a large bipartisan group of senators.

The rise in technology and its application has shifted what national security means relative to years prior, what Warner described as “simpler times.”

“While the ongoing war in Ukraine has shown that conventional military capabilities are still important, I think the very nature of national security is undergoing a profound transformation,” he said at the top of the committee’s annual worldwide threats hearing Wednesday. “We can no longer just pay attention to who has the most tanks, airplanes or missiles. We also need to focus on technology, R&D dollars, strategic investment flows and supply chains. Because whoever leads and wins the challenges in technology domains will have an edge in national security competition in the future.”

Warner pointed to the role cyber tools have played, allowing actors to have an impact – either through espionage, subterfuge or outright destructive effects — from across the world.  

He also singled out China, who has sought to become a world power that rivals the United States and is making large investments in critical technologies to pursue those aims.

“I think the revolution in technology is not only the main arena for competition with the People’s Republic of China, it’s also the main determinant of our future as an intelligence service as well,” William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told the committee.

As the U.S. turned its focus to other priorities, China made significant investments and advancements, he noted.

“While America was focused for two decades on counterterrorism, China was racing to overtake the United States in a range of emerging and foundational technologies such as advanced wireless communication, semiconductors, quantum, synthetic biology and next-generation energy — as well as taking not only the extraction but the processing of rare earth minerals that are so critical in so many of those technologies,” he said. “The PRC has also become an active player in the international technology standard-setting bodies and is embedding itself in global supply chains.”

Others intelligence officials echoed concerns about other nations catching up to the United States.

“When I came in the Army 1984, we owned the technology — the West owned the technology. We won the Cold War and then I think we took our eye off that ball,” Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the committee. “Now it’s about how do we apply this asymmetric advantage that we have and this partnership of folks sitting at this table right now who worked so closely together to try and defend our nation.”

The unclassified version of the U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment, released Wednesday, notes that new technologies, particularly in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, are being developed faster than governments and companies can shape norms.

“The convergence of emerging technologies is likely to create potentially breakthrough technologies not foreseeable by examining narrow science and technology areas, which could lead to the rapid development of asymmetric threats to U.S. interests,” it states. “The convergence of capabilities in high-performance computing, big data, and machine learning — each a critical enabler across multiple domains — could have broad yet unidentified consequences across military, commercial, and basic research applications with relevance to national defense, economic security, and political stability.”

Moreover, many advanced technologies are being developed by private industry, providing a shortcut for other nations to acquire them.

“Foreign intelligence services are adopting cutting-edge technologies — from advanced cyber tools to unmanned systems to enhanced technical surveillance equipment — that improve their capabilities and challenge U.S. defenses. Much of this technology is available commercially, providing a shortcut for previously unsophisticated services to become legitimate threats,” the threat assessment said.

Officials at Wednesday’s hearing said partnerships are key to regaining the edge and winning this global competition.

“Over my lifetime, I have seen increasingly the innovation of critical foundational technologies occurring in the context of the private sector. And our capacity to work with them to understand essentially what those innovations are and how we can help them protect themselves in this context is another aspect of this that has to be focused on and something we spend a lot of time on,” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said.

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After mounting public pressure, lawmakers passed provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2022 requiring the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Defense Department to submit “a report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)” to appropriate congressional committees by Oct. 31 2022, and annually thereafter through 2026. A classified version of ODNI’s 2022 annual report was delivered to Congress on Wednesday, several months after it was due, and an unclassified version was released publicly Thursday.

In that public, 12-page review, officials provide brief details about “366 additional reports of UAP” since the government’s preliminary assessment identified 144 reports — a total of 510 cataloged accounts to date. 

The “majority of new” UAP reporting originates from Navy and Air Force aviators and operators who “witnessed UAP during the course of their operational duties and reported the events” to DOD’s now-defunct UAP Task Force and its recently formed All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, through “official channels,” the report states. 

“Broadly speaking, when it comes to the types of processes and procedures that have been established, [AARO], as you highlighted, has closely worked with each of the service branches to come up with a streamlined reporting system to be able to collect that information. And then, in addition to the military branches, it is also working with the interagency — so, organizations like NOAA, the Coast Guard, and the Department of the Energy, just to name a few,” Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told DefenseScoop during a press briefing on Friday.

“And so, by establishing those reporting procedures, what it does, and I think you’ll see this in the report, is it allows the collection of data, and more data allows us to be a little bit more rigorous in terms of how we go after investigating these incidents,” Ryder added.

Notably, when AARO was established by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks in July 2022, the Pentagon also updated its official terminology for UAP to mean unidentified anomalous phenomena — and no longer unidentified aerial phenomena — to account for reported objects that appear to move between mediums. NASA quickly followed suit.

DefenseScoop confirmed with a Pentagon spokesperson on Thursday that, while all the future annual UAP reports through 2026 will account for that update and include data on anomalous phenomena, this 2022 review refers to airborne happenings in U.S. airspace.

In that public assessment, officials wrote that “UAP continue to represent a hazard to flight safety and pose a possible adversary collection threat” to the U.S., at this point. However, improved coordination between the intelligence community, DOD and other agencies has resulted in more data sets that span air, sea and space. 

“AARO, in coordination with the IC, is focused on identifying solutions to manage and alleviate the resulting data problem, including the intake, indexing, visualization, and analysis of that data across multiple security domains,” officials wrote. 

Of the 366 newly-identified reports, 26 have been characterized as unmanned aircraft systems or other drone-like entities; 163 have been characterized as balloons or balloon-like items; and 6 have been attributed to clutter, like birds or debris, they noted. 

Those reports are not yet fully resolved — but again, some progress has been made.

At this point, though, the government also has evidence of 171 uncharacterized and unattributed UAP reports that each requires further analysis for clarity, according to the review. 

In an online response to the report, Chris Mellon — a national security expert who previously served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — argued that it demonstrates how “major progress in developing an effective government capability for investigating the UAP enigma and kicking down the doors of ignorance that for far too long have prevented progress in understanding the phenomenon.”

The war unfolding in Ukraine and recent conflicts in Armenia and in Yemen are revealing how drones are increasingly integral in modern military conflicts, another factor that plays into investigating UAPs.

“Therefore, any capability that helps to reduce clutter and identify genuine aerial threats is of great value to the military and national security. In that regard, Congressional initiatives related to UAP are already paying dividends by improving our ability to distinguish legitimate threats from innocuous balloons and other airborne clutter,” Mellon wrote.

Still, in his view, the new report also “presents the bare minimum of information needed to comply with Congress’ request” for an unclassified assessment. He noted that there was no indication if the uncategorized reports captured so far were in space or underwater, or they were attributable to foreign governments. 

“Unanswered questions abound,” Mellon wrote.

Since the IC’s first preliminary UAP assessment in June 2021, “UAP reporting has increased, partially due to a concentrated effort to destigmatize the topic” and instead recognize the safety risks or adversarial activity it implies, officials wrote in the first NDAA-mandated UAP annual assessment. They also expressed confidence that AARO, and its new analytic process being applied to its expanding portfolio of reports “will increase resolution of UAP events.”

Among other notable inclusions, the 12-page public assessment confirmed that there have “been no encounters with UAP confirmed to contribute directly to adverse health-related effects to the” observers to date. Military aviators in the past have reportedly experienced adverse health effects with symptoms like that of the mysterious Havana syndrome, which has impacted U.S. spies and diplomats.

When asked by DefenseScoop during the Pentagon briefing on Thursday whether the department or ODNI could share more details about what any anomalous health incidents associated with UAP sightings actually ended up being due to, Ryder said that he did not have further information to provide at the time.

“I would say, broadly speaking, I think one of the key points in this report, you know, is given the potential hazard that UAPs do present — notably — there’s been no reported collisions of military aircraft, or U.S. aircraft rather, and UAPs. But in terms of those specifics, I’d refer you back to the report,” Ryder said.

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In addition to educating the public on what disinformation is and how to be wary of sources of information, ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the intelligence community (IC) declassified material to make the public aware of Russian feints, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Stacey Dixon noted.

“What it did do though, was alert the world of what was happening, pointed people so that they were now focused on it and now, if disinformation came out that was going to be used as a justification for the invasion, people would be able to think twice about whether or not that was actually true in a way that had we not publicized it beforehand, had we not shared it beforehand, it’s not clear whether people would have been aware that that could have been disinformation,” she said during an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

While the disclosures ahead of the invasion did not prevent Russia from taking military action, Dixon said there had been “a window of hope of maybe this will keep them from invading.”

Policymakers told the IC that it was important to inform the public of Russia’s efforts. However, this required a rigorous process to determine what to disclose as to not expose the community’s sensitive sources and methods for collecting its classified insights.

The CIA director recently declared this salvo of public disclosure a success in the broader information campaign against Russia.

“I think the work that we’ve done — and it’s not without risk as an intelligence community — to declassify information has been very effective,” CIA chief William Burns told Congress in March.

One such process to get information out was working with private companies and open source intelligence.

“I think we have been thinking about open source information and how it actually fits into the intelligence enterprise for quite a while,” Dixon said. “Figuring out how do we … bring in the information that’s useful and see how it can complement the classified information we have in terms of being able to provide insights to our customers.”

In years past, the military has sought to supplement open source information with its exquisite classified channels as opposed to the other way, a marked shift in the way it did business.

The plethora of open source information puts the intelligence community in a “different place where we are not the sole ones to have access to that information,” Dixon said, which is a net good for the global community.

However, Dixon warned that some are quicker to jump to conclusions and might not assess the information on hand as rigorously as federal agencies.

“I know the rigor with which our analysts interpret information, I don’t know the rigor with which all other analysts interpret information,” Dixon said. “I’ve seen sometimes others, with perhaps less rigor in their analysis, make statements and claims that you really can’t tell [the accuracy of] from that information itself. It may be a logical next step, but our intelligence is based on what we actually see or hear or … measure.”

Dixon also mentioned that the IC worked with and asked commercial satellite imagery companies to publicize photos related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as a way to bridge the gap between releasing classified material and those collected from open sources.

“In terms of being able to share more with the public, there’s things that we would have to declassify if we were to use our classified sources,” she said. “It’s easier for [the private sector] because their sources aren’t classified so they’re able to actually just go forward. They’re putting things out there that we aren’t asking them to put out.”

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The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity awarded Biometric Recognition & Identification at Altitude and Range (BRIAR) research contracts to seven teams and more-focused research contracts to two more.

Software systems developed by the BRIAR program will be used by the intelligence community and Pentagon to identify people from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) even in turbulence.

“National security technologies must accurately and reliably operate under conditions that are extremely difficult for existing biometric technologies to succeed in,” said Program Manager Lars Ericson, in the announcement. “I am confident that our excellent team of research organizations, scientists and engineers will push the research forward and build technologies that are significantly ahead of the current state of the art.”

Teams that won BRIAR research contracts are: Accenture Federal Services LLC; Intelligent Automation, Inc.; Kitware, Inc.; Michigan State University; Systems & Technology Research, the University of Houston; and the University of Southern California.

Carnegie Mellon University and General Electric Research won focused research contracts that will support the BRIAR program.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory; National Institute of Standards and Technology; and the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command C5ISR Center, Research and Technology Integration Directorate will perform testing and evaluation for the program.

IARPA invests in high-risk research with the potential to greatly benefit the intelligence community.

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Merritt officially took the role, housed under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in late January.

Michael Waschull had been serving as acting CIO of the IC since January 2021 and will continue on in his official role as deputy CIO.

“Dr. Merritt will lead our ongoing modernization efforts to transform the IC Information Technology Enterprise, ensure the security of the IC’s Information Technology systems, and enhance IT cooperation within the IC,” Haines said in her announcement. “Dr. Merritt brings over 20 years of technical, analytic, and policy expertise in cyber and national security operations to the role. Her accomplishments span the U.S. government.”

Within that portfolio, she’ll also be responsible for the continued rollout of the IC multi-cloud offering, the Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) program.

Merritt comes to the IC after serving most recently as a program manager for Dreamport, a nonprofit associated with the Maryland Innovation and Security Institute and created by U.S. Cyber Command. Prior to that, she spent time in government as principal deputy CIO for cyber at the Department of Energy and as acting senior director for intelligence programs on the National Security Council during the Obama administration.

She’ll be the first permanent CIO for the IC since Matthew Kozma stepped away from the role. Before that, John Sherman — now serving as the CIO at the Department of Defense — held the role for several years.

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