In international affairs, intelligence has been called the 'missing dimension', the second oldest profession, and the 'hidden wiring' of government. As a staple of literature and film, espionage is deeply rooted in governments around the world. Intelligence has a long history. All throughout history, politicians, military leaders, and insurgents have required forewarning and situational awareness. Modern intelligence has several global ancestries. Particularly signals intelligence agencies have seen their business models change. As an intelligence activity, they must capture and store more data than ever before, while understanding how adversaries seek to learn about us and disrupt us, as well as identifying when and where they themselves are vulnerable. Terrorist attacks, wars, and leaks have established intelligence as a cornerstone of 21st century governance. 

Traditionally, intelligence studies have been divided into history and political science. It has been reported that historians have studied diplomatic histories, biographies of famous individuals, the development of notable institutions, as well as turning points in modern history. In recent decades, political scientists have focused on the development of intelligence machinery and the effects of intelligence on politics. Collaboration between practitioners and researchers continues to be viewed as valuable in sustaining the field as a model for socially useful and transformative research.

Institutions in the intelligence community are known for their scandals and affairs. The author of this book proposes to rupture dominant imaginaries of intelligence as associated with ‘securing’ and ‘protecting’, and instead locate intelligence pertaining to competing imaginaries and practices of democracy, rights and the rule of law, with a level of counter vigilance proportional to the power of cyber-paranoids and global voyeurs in the future (see Chapters 1 and 2).

According to the author, security as producing insecurity or as a process of (in)securitization has been understood in two ways. One is securitization entails the construction of friend/enemy, normal/abnormal relations that produce insecurity for a whole range of groups and individuals within and across state borders. The other is the process is not simply one of knowing who the enemy or the risky suspect, is but one of changing societal relations in democracies.

Using this conceptualization of intelligence and security, the author discusses new ways of thinking about culture in intelligence contexts in Chapter 3. These include (1) organizational, (2) strategic, (3) elite culture, (4) culture as propaganda, and (5) cultural representations of intelligence in popular discourse. Chapter 4 acknowledges Intelligence Studies’ sluggish response to intensifying calls in society for attention to inequality of various kinds. For example, on the history of women in intelligence and the advancement of gender, sexuality, class, and racial equality.

Chapter 5 spins around AI and ethics in intelligence by identifying three ways AI is used by government and federal agencies. These are assisted intelligence, augmented intelligence, and autonomous intelligence. To assist decision-making, assisted intelligence uses big data, cloud, and data science to automate simple processes and tasks, analyzing mass datasets and identifying pre-determined patterns or targets. It produces results that need to be analyzed or verified by humans. 

Augmented intelligence enhances human activities through machine learning and predictive data analytics, producing ‘actionable data’ that can be used by human officers. Autonomous intelligence enables machines and bots to run independently of human intervention. Machines and bots can make decisions based on continuous data flows. There are three merits of using AI in intelligence: (1) capacity, (2) skills, and (3) human bias. However, ethical issues are raised by using AI: (1) algorithmic bias and error, (2) privacy, particularly those beyond social media and open-source platforms.

Chapter 6 provides a situated description of intelligence leadership and governance in theoretical and applied senses. It explicates that leadership is a multi-disciplinary effort from the prism of individual attributes and organizational lenses in priority areas, such as organizational culture, collaboration, information sharing, technological innovation, ethics, and workforce planning.

Chapter 7 discusses intelligence and biosecurity by conceptualizing disease as a weapon of war (Yellow Rain in Southeast Asia) and as a multi-faceted threat to global health security. The author advocates that as the spectrum of threats to biosecurity evolves, an expansion of the stakeholders and tools involved in intelligence gathering and threat assessments should be considered in war, defense, international order and strategy, medicine, health care, life sciences, crime, internal security, public order, and police investigations.

Chapter 8 asserts that intelligence is an inherently global and diverse exercise. A multitude of domestic and international factors have enabled this recent expansion of the global intelligence literature. National intelligence systems are unique ecosystems shaped by a mixture of historical experiences, strategic threats, political culture, geography, and bureaucratic dynamics.

Chapters 9 and 10 gauge technology's impact on intelligence analysis. The author outlines four types of disinformation: (1) computational propaganda, (2) image manipulation, (3) deep fakes, and (4) active measures such as influence operations and perception management campaigns.

Chapters 11 and 15 reframe intelligence studies through (1) report drafting, (2) deception and intelligence in peace and war (psychological studies), (3) global teaching in intelligence, and (4) archival post-modern research.

In summary, the book contributes to the emerging knowledge of intelligence studies in three aspects. The first is decolonizing the understanding or traditions in military, intelligence, propaganda and other operations. This is a vital element in developing social, military, and political resilience. Diversification and moving away from an Anglocentric flavor is needed to globalize and deepen our base of knowledge on the practice and its use in war, peace, and conflict operations. 

The second is the acknowledgement of the impact of technology that merits continued study beyond history, as a key evolutionary driver of intelligence. The third is the synergy of human analysts and machine algorithms filtered by near ubiquitous, complex, digital data filters. Improvements should be made in mitigating the impact on all levels in doctrine, technology, and psychology, in tandem with building social and strategic resilience.

Admittedly, the secret services have been analyzed very differently across security studies, surveillance studies and intelligence studies. A recent collective discussion of critical intelligence studies has proposed to study intelligence as a ‘social phenomenon’.  It highlights the evolving social life of intelligence itself: dispersed across and maintained by people with varying relations to intelligence services, an everyday aspect of different professions.

A take-home message is that learning has become an increasingly collaborative process. Social constructivists stress that learning should be authentic if ti is to promote higher-order thinking and must relate to the lived experiences of the student and empower them to change reality. Education is transformational, and co-creation involves constant critical self-reflection in intelligence studies. In this sense, critique bears the traces of its etymological roots in crisis. Crisis entails ‘the moment of judgment and diagnosis, as well as the prescription for a therapy, the medical origins of the term clearly continue to be preserved in the usage of political language’.  This definition distances intelligence from the neutrality of ‘information management’. It opens a new path for supplementing the clandestine interference in the lives of citizens and non-citizens, known as mass surveillance.

Cite this article:

APA 6th Edition

Dylan, H., Goodman, M.S. i Dover, R. (2024). The Hidden Wiring of Government (2022). National security and the future, 25 (1), 289-294. Preuzeto s https://www.nsf-journal.hr/online-issues/book-reviews/id/1505

MLA 8th Edition

Dylan, Huw, et al. "The Hidden Wiring of Government (2022)." National security and the future, vol. 25, br. 1, 2024, str. 289-294. https://www.nsf-journal.hr/online-issues/book-reviews/id/1505. Citirano 17.04.2024.

Chicago 17th Edition

Dylan, Huw, Michael S. Goodman i Robert Dover. "The Hidden Wiring of Government (2022)." National security and the future 25, br. 1 (2024): 289-294. https://www.nsf-journal.hr/online-issues/book-reviews/id/1505

Harvard

Dylan, H., Goodman, M.S., i Dover, R. (2024). 'The Hidden Wiring of Government (2022)', National security and the future, 25(1), str. 289-294. Preuzeto s: https://www.nsf-journal.hr/online-issues/book-reviews/id/1505 (Datum pristupa: DD.MM.YYYY.)

Vancouver

Dylan H, Goodman MS, Dover R. The Hidden Wiring of Government (2022). National security and the future [Internet]. 2024 [pristupljeno DD.MM.YYYY.];25(1):289-294. Dostupno na: https://www.nsf-journal.hr/online-issues/book-reviews/id/1505

IEEE

H. Dylan, M.S. Goodman i R. Dover, "The Hidden Wiring of Government (2022)", National security and the future, vol.25, br. 1, str. 289-294, 2024. [Online]. Dostupno na: https://www.nsf-journal.hr/online-issues/book-reviews/id/1505. [Citirano: DD.MM.YYYY.]